Dolphin Can't save Bookmarks?

[Stew Schneider]

Andrew Jarrett wrote:
> On Jan 4, 2008 7:04 PM, Clark <cpmcc at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
>   
>>  Whatever the niceties of the options above, all way above my head, by
>> inserting a literal copy including spaces and Capitals,  Dolphin no longer
>> does peculiar things on shut down.  Is Sudo the Linux command language and
>> if so where do I access the hand book?
>>
>>  Thanks Terence and Nils,
>>
>>  Clark.
>>     
Andrew has done a smashing job of explaining this, but it occurred to me 
that there may be one piece of it that is still puzzling to you, if you 
are coming from the Windows world.

One of the reasons Linux is more secure than Windows is the idea of 
"permissions". A permission (as applied to a file) means just that -- 
what a particular user can do with a particular file. In Windows, you're 
constantly running as superuser (Computer Administrator) unless you 
specifically don't (Limited User). That means you can do as my father 
did with the first computer I gave him -- delete all those files that he 
didn't know what they were. In his case, that would have been the 
operating system.

In a *nix system, those files belong to a user called root, and only 
that user can write or change them, because the permissions are set up 
that way.

Let's say you had a system file and you looked at it with the command ls 
-l, which is like dir in the command window of a Windows box. You'd see 
something like:

-rwx------ 1 root root     9248 2007-03-03 22:37  important.fl

The file is owned by the user root, and belongs to the group root. It 
was created 03/03/2007 at 22:37 and is named important.fl

Now, in a Windows system, running as a computer administrator, you could 
do anything you wanted to this file, even delete it. In Linux, only the 
owner could do anything with this file, because of the way the 
permissions are set.
-rwx --- ---

I divided the permissions up into three sections for clarity. The first 
section, rwx, means that the owner (root) can read, write or execute the 
file. The next group of three, ---, are the group permissions. A member 
of the root group who *isn't* root can do nothing with the file. The 
last three are similarly the permissions for everybody else, and they 
can't do anything with it, either.

By carefully setting the permissions and ownership of files (and 
commands are files, too), you can control who can do what to which file.

Pulling it together, something in your Dolphin installation made the 
file belong to somebody other than you. So, you need to change the 
ownership to fix it.  Let's say the file (sitting in your ,kde folder) 
was called myfile. ls -l might show:

-rwxr-xr-x   bruce bruce 9248 2007-03-03 22:37 myfile

For it to operate properly, assume it needs to be:

-rwxr-xr-x   clark clark 9248 2007-03-03 22:37 myfile

BUT, the file doesn't belong to you, so you don't have permission to do 
anything to it, including changing the ownership from bruce to you, and 
until you do, you can't write to that file because only bruce has write 
permission.

Enter the super user, again. You can't log in as root, as a security 
precaution, but you can *masquerade* as root, *if* you're in the sudoers 
group (that keeps bad guys from logging in and messing with your files). 
Since root can do anything to any file, using sudo you can correct the 
ownership error.

stew