Launching root user installed application as a standard user

I am a newbie in Linux. Please help me out of this mess.

I've downloaded and installed an application as root and created its desktop shortcut launcher and worked. On switching to the standard user's account, I copied the launcher to the standard account desktop. I proceeded to edit the file permissions to both files using:

sudo chmod 777 <name_of_file>

After all this I am getting an error bellow when launching the application as a standard user.

Failed to execute child process "path of orignal executable file in root" (Permission denied).*

Please help me out.

1 Answer

When you install an application as a root user, the data directory is owned by root. Therefore, a standard user can't write to it.

To solve this login to root and navigate to ~/.local/share/ and locate the application data files' folder. It should have the same name as the application. Use ls -la ./<application_folder_name> to determine the owner of the files. It should be root.

Run chown -R <user>:<user> ~/.local/share/<application_folder_name> to change the ownership file property. Remember to change user to your standard user name and group. Example; my user name is justech and application_folder to your own application_folder's name. Therefore, I will edit this to sudo chown -R justech:justech ~/.local/share/nano if nano was my application folder's name.

After this you are good to go.

Success!

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