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I installed on my Raspberry pi 3 running on Debian the headless version of transmission:

sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon

After this I stopped the service and I modified the settings:

sudo service transmission-daemon stop
sudo nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

Beyond changing user and password I changed also the download directory:

...
"download-dir": "/home/pi/Desktop",
...

After this I rebooted the service

sudo service transmission-daemon start

Now if I try to download any file I obtain the following error:

Error: Permission denied (/home/pi/Desktop/ubuntu-17.04-desktop-amd64.iso)

I don't see what I've done wrong.

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2 Answers 2

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The Transmission daemon runs as the debian-transmission user. This user is (probably) not allowed to write to /home/pi/Desktop. You can verify this with ls -ld /home/pi/Desktop and interpreting the output.

Change the permissions/ownership on /home/pi/Desktop or let Transmission download to a file where it is allowed to store data.

You can give debian-transmission access to the folder with chown or setfacl. In case you're not inclined to do any research on that, the following will probably work:

$ setfacl -m u:debian-transmission:rwX /home/pi/Desktop
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  • Ok, these are the permission: drwxr-xr-x 2 pi pi 4096 giu 8 23:03 /home/pi/Desktop It's possible to allow debian-trasmission to write also on pi folders?
    – Timmy
    Aug 3, 2017 at 12:21
  • It is... See answer
    – mtak
    Aug 3, 2017 at 13:13
  • Thank you, I'll try when I can access again to my raspberry
    – Timmy
    Aug 5, 2017 at 15:28
  • @Timmy, any updates? If this solves your problem, please mark it as such so other people know this could solve their issue.
    – mtak
    Aug 8, 2017 at 6:34
  • I'm really sorry the raspberry is gone off and so I don't have anymore the ssh access, in a couple of week I'll be physically there.
    – Timmy
    Aug 12, 2017 at 16:44
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I was tearing my hair out with this problem, until a related question on the dedicated Stack Exchange Raspberry Pi site prompted me to examine /var/log/daemon.log

I used the excellent PiMyLifeUp guide to set up my Pi for torrent downloads, but didn't exactly follow the recommendations when editing /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json. Specifically, since I'd left "incomplete-dir-enabled" set to false, it didn't seem unreasonable for me to change the "incomplete-dir" setting to "(unused)", to remind me that I didn't intend to use it.

So you can imagine my surprise, gentle reader, when I found references to Couldn't create "(unused)": Permission denied in /var/log/daemon.log.

I've just edited settings.json so that "incomplete-dir" points to the same folder as "download-dir", and everything works fine! Fortunately, I already knew I had to run sudo systemctl stop transmission-daemon before my edit, otherwise the daemon would have simply overwritten my changes when it eventually shut down (I tore an awful lot more hair out before discovering this yesterday! :)

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