I need write access to local disks in Dolphin (both installed and LiveCD)

[Nils Kassube]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> I do not have write access to local hard drives that show up in
> Dolphin's Places sidebar. How can I get write access? This applies to
> installed systems, and to systems running the LiveCD (both suffer
> from this issue). Thanks.

You can get write access with "sudo chown" or "sudo chmod" but I suppose 
that wasn't your question. Instead you were probably looking to do it 
with Dolphin.

It depends on your file system. If it is FAT-something you will be owner 
if the disks are mounted via HAL (i.e. Dolphin). Then you should have 
write access and that's how it works with e.g. USB sticks.

However, if the file system is ext[2,3,4] the ownership of individual 
files / folders is stored with the file system and only the real owner 
(according to UID) or member of the appropriate group has write access 
to the files. If you take the disk of an installed system from another 
machine and mount it in your machine, you have access to the /tmp folder 
of that disk. And maybe you have write access to one of the folders in 
/home which possibly belongs to someone else who happens to have the 
same UID like you on your machine. I think there shouldn't be a way for 
Dolphin to give you write access to arbitrary files / folders. Well, 
maybe there could be a context menu option to open a folder as root but 
I don't think this option exists already.


Nils