Universal Media Server | Forum

Hello,
For the first time, I decided to install Linux Mint on my laptop.
I like this OS a lot and I have decided to migrate as many softwares I used to have on Windows 10 as possible to Linux to make it as my main OS.
I successfully installed Universal Media Server on Linux Mint, it's the very first software that I ever have installed using Linux command system, following tutorials and adapting command lines to my taste and I pretty happy and proud of it.
UMS is installed in the usr/ums folder.
However, I am not used to some potential difficulties encountered from Windows to Linux such as this one:

When i launch UMS, it detects my HDTV and my HDTV detects my laptop back. Everything runs fine except:
I can't navigate beyond the "/" directory on my TV.
When I look at the log, it says "WARN Can't list files in non-readable directory".
I attached you the log, and hopefully, you can help resolve it.
Thank you
Best Regards and keep up the good work

Most modern file systems have a permission system for who can do what with files and folders. Windows didn't get permissions until NTFS became standard (FAT and FAT32 don't have permission support), but Linux has inherited Unix' permission system from the start. This means that Windows' permission system is much younger and thus more thought through than the (ancient) system used on Linux.

On Windows permissions are thus inherited in a logical way, and you rarely have to think of them. In fact, Microsoft goes a long way in hiding them from the user. On Linux this is not the case, and newly created files and folders get permissions from the very outdated and inconvenient "umask". This is rarely set to what you want it to and is generally too restrictive (I guess the philosophy is that when you are to give wrong permissions, it's better to give too little than too much). As a consequence, this is generally left to the user to take care of, and a lot of stuff simply won't work unless you set permissions after creating or copying files and folders.

You'll need to read up on the Linux permissions system. It's very simple in its basic structure, but a lot of extensions has been made to "patch" some of the shortcomings, and many of these are less logical to me at least. Basically, what you have to make sure of is that the user under which UMS runs (the user that starts UMS.sh) must have read permission to all shared files and read + execute permissions to all shared folders.

There are many ways to do this, but my "standard" way of handling it is using "ls -la" to view permissions, and "chmod" to set them. You might also need to use "chown" in some cases. This isn't meant to be a full explanation, but should give you some hints to find the information you need.

Thanks for your answer.
I am going to look deeper into this and hopefully fix the issue.
Best regards