Cannot claim ownership of a folder

Question

I downloaded a .tar.gz package (new theme for my Ubuntu 16.04), extracted it and tried to copy-paste file into usr/share/themes, but apparently this folder is owned by root. After some research (this question) I came up with an idea: sudo chown -R username ~/.share and got the message that such file or directory doesn't exist. So I tried another method sudo chown -R username:username share followed by the same message; this file or directory doesn't exist.

Without ownership I cannot install new theme, but obviously I'm doing something wrong. If anyone can help me I'd be delighted.

Answer 1

Thanks to user Zanna I found a solution. If anyone experiences the same problem, here is what you should do.

First of all, use sudo -i nautilus in order to gain root privileges. Copy extracted theme files into usr/share/themes (or /.local/share/themes if that's where those files of yours belong). By doing this you only copy those files, but they are still useless.

Next, right click the folder and choose "Properties". You have to open a tag named "Permission". You will (most likely) see that Owner is root and Access is "Create and delete files". That's OK, leave it be. Next one is Group and once again root is mentioned. This time set Access to "Access files". Finally, with Others you should also choose Access to be "Access files".

Exit nautilus. You might need to close all windows or even restart system. After this operation, open Gnome Tweak Tool. If you don't have it, run sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool. Under Appearance tab you'll see GTK+ Theme option. This is where your new theme can be found.

Cheers!

Answer 2

I think you need to do something like this:

(for example the downloaded file is my_theme.tar.gz and the working folder is ~/Downloads)

gunzip my_theme.tar.gz
tar -xvf my_theme.tar

(now we got suppose a folder my_theme)
(after this we need to copy it to the theme-folder)

sudo cp -r ~/Downloads/my_theme /usr/share/themes/

That's all.