I have a fix. I no longer think it's a problem with gedit or gnome. Some time ago I experimented with SELinux and soon decided I didn't want to use it. The two users around here are both trustworthy and I didn't see an advantage when port 23 for ssh is the only real exposure to the internet. We thought we removed SELinux using the GUI to reinstall and restart. It appears that process didn't do everything. We still had access control lists for a lot of directories including all of the $HOME variety. Gedit was being denied directory access to create *~ files and it's procedure apparently needs to create a new one before it overwrites the old - that's reasonable.
The fix was to commit a couple of day's effort to learn about ACLs (access control lists) and how to get rid of them. setfacl and getfacl are two tools delivered with ubuntu with man pages are one place to start. setfacl -x u:doug doug with the working directory set to /home/doug/ made it possible for gedit to make backups in my directory. setfattr is not delivered with ubuntu but can be obtained using Synaptic. After considerable trial and error: sudo setfattr -h -x security.selinux * ;# fixes every subdirectory in the current directory. The way that everything has to be done with root access can only mean that SELinux has more to do with careless users than it has to do with internet attacks. ACLs are apparently part of the Linux kernel and SELinux just uses them. This bug, and probably #251083, can be considered closed. Well, I with gedit working as user doug I still don't understand why ACLs prevented creation of *~ files in doug's home directory. Perhaps something to do with setuid? -- No backup files created in home directory https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/474579 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
