I have just installed a new version of Joomla 1.5.21.
After installing the Multi Sites component and going to install the patches, I get the error message "Unable to write entry" for the file administrator/includes/defines.php.
I have set all of the permissions on this path to be 777, but still the message persists, together with a whole list of other errors.
None of the error messages now relate to file permissions (except the "unable to write entry" message in red at the top) as I changed the relevant permissions when these messages originally appeared in the patches error list.

For now set all your folders and files to 775. You can get more specific with permissions later.

Also ensure that your user and group settings on the folders are correct.

On Ubuntu I have to chown root:www-data my files and folders on the master.
Since the slaves are created by the www-data user their folders and files are owned by www-data:www-data.

Hope this helps

Check effectivelly the ownership of the the files and folder.

This symptom let suppose that you might have files and folder created with one user and later you could have a "apache" user that try to access your files without the permission.

Sometime, this can be solved when using the Joomla FTP Layer that you can configure in the Global Configuration.

This error message is also documented in the user manual.

Thank you. I had read the documentation and checked the permissions of all of the relevant files, as the documentation suggested, and they were OK.

The problem was solved by setting up the Joomla ftp, and letting Check Patches run with Joomla ftp enabled.

Geoff

So if the problem is solved with the Jooma FTP Layer, this seems confirme the problem of ownership that is not the same as the one used by your HTTP Server.

Try to check that because you could encounter problem with the Symbolic Link that might not work when permission are not OK.

Indeed files created by the HTTP server have a different owner than those created via ftp., and this does give me a problem when trying to create a slave website with error messages that symbolic links cannot be created.

I cannot see how to change the ownership of either the ftp account or the HTTP server, though.

Geoff