mne-python: make_watershed_bem - IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'brain'

System: Python 2.7.12 Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS MNE version 0.14.git

I have been running into a few problems with this function. Initially I had the same problem as #3274 where freesurfer was not being found/setup correctly. I thought this was fixed in 0.14 but I ran into the same issue. I manually modified the utils.py to setup freesurfer before it ran the command. That fixed the problem but I get this new problem, Permission denied, ‘brain’ The following shows the error. I have editted a few things such as subject directory for privacy reasons.

Saving /SUBJECT_DIR/bem/watershed/ws done Triangle file: created by USER on Tue Oct 18 15:30:33 2016 nvert = 10242 ntri = 20480 Triangle neighbors and vertex normals... Traceback (most recent call last): File "pythonScripts/pipeline.py", line 208, in <module> main() File "pythonScripts/pipeline.py", line 169, in main bem.make_watershed_bem(URSI, subjects_dir=MRISubjectDirectory, overwrite=True) File "<string>", line 2, in make_watershed_bem File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mne/utils.py", line 708, in verbose return function(*args, **kwargs) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mne/bem.py", line 1081, in make_watershed_bem write_surface(s, surf['rr'], surf['tris'], volume_info=volume_info) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mne/surface.py", line 764, in write_surface with open(fname, 'wb') as fid: IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'brain'

I hope this gives enough information!

Extra information, I was getting these issues previously using an older system: CentOS release 6.7 Python 2.6.6 MNE version 0.12

Upgraded system to get newer version of MNE but the problems still exist