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Fimu

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 28, 2009
3
0
I was about to create a topic asking for a solution to a problem when a friend of mine came up with a brilliant workaraound. I wanted to share this in case someone has the same issue one day.

When I first got my macbook, I changed the shortname to something else a few days after getting it. The shortname was something totally different from the home folder name.

Today, I had to archive and reinstall leopard. For unknown reasons to me, in the new instalation leopard set the home folder name to the shortname I was using before. Because of that, many applications started to malfunction since they had no write access to the old home folder, which didn't exist anymore.

In a nutshell:

Before:
shortname - Fimu
homefolder - marcotuliopires

Now:
shortname - Fimu
homefolder - Fimu

I wanted the home folder to be Fimu. I didn't want to change it back to marcotuliopires.

Firefox extensions started to complain about not having access to /Users/marcotuliopires after the archive/reinstall thing. Many applications were not working properly because of the same problem.

I was thinking about crazy ideas like creating a new home folder, move everything, then rename and change permissions... or script something to look for the folder name in every file and replace it, etc.

Then, a friend of mine told me that he knew something that would definitely fix it but it would not be the optimal solution. Since it worked perfectly and I will do a fresh reinstall as soon as I purchase the Snow Leopard Upgrade, I didn't complain. That's the beauty of being built on Unix:

on Terminal:

sudo ln -sf /Users/Fimu /Users/marcotuliopires

Can't beat simplicity.

Cheers,

Fimu
 
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