quick permissions question

[JustGretchen]

So I have 2 users on my PowerMac...My Wife and I. I had set up her account initially, and added myself later. We are both administrator users.

It seems though, that I can only install or update (over right) certain programs from her side of things. I have gotten info on the Macintosh HD> Applications folder, and made sure that both users have read and write privileges for the folder, but the files inside don't always reflect that change.

For instance I'm trying to update VLC, and it's telling me I don't have sufficient privileges to do so. I know for fact that I installed this initially from her side of the machine, and when I get info on the VLC file that's there my user doesn't show in the permissions and the user group "everyone" is set to read only, which I know I could change, but I want to do it for all of the files in there so I don't have to switch back to her user to simply upgrade a program if i need to.

Any help here? Thanks!

 

[frankblundt]

Applications > Utilities > Disk Utilty : First Aid - Repair Disk Permissions
? Not a bad place to start in any case

 

[JustGretchen]

that's not going to fix what I need to do I don't believe but I will try.

Any other suggestions?

 

[JustGretchen]

Strange, my permissions are FUBAR...and it's fixing them now, but I'm not sure how that happened because this install of Leopard was completely fresh and is relatively new as well and setting permissions for both users to access the applications folder was one of the first things I did.

 

[frankblundt]

You shouldn't need to reset permission in the Applications folder (as long as it's the main one, not the optional one you can create inside each User folder)

Any user with Admin priviledges should be able to update the Applications (System, Library etc) folders with the permissions at the default

The only odd exception I've found is that sometimes it doesn't like copying from a network folder to those folders - somewhere in that process it seems to forget to ask you for the admin username password - but if you copy it to the desktop first, and then into Applications, all works as expected

 

[JustGretchen]

well permissions repair did nothing to help the situation.

When I try to replace VLC, i get the error:
"The operation cannot be completed beacuse you do not have sufficient privilieges for some of the items."

If i delete VLC, and empty trash, then install the new one, no issues.

 

[JustGretchen]

Any ideas on this guys?

 

[angelwatt]

I think the better setup would be to have one admin account and then setup two standard accounts for you and your wife. Then you just have to input the admin credentials when doing the updates. Not sure how well that would work at this point though, but you can switch an account from admin to standard using the System Preferences. You could try changing your wife's to a standard account to see if it helps anything.

You can also do a Get Info on applications in question and set the permissions there to see if that helps.