Sudo in Gnome, cp & Wildcards, Invert Selection (OT?)
Veli-Pekka Tätilä
vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi
Mon Oct 2 20:22:41 BST 2006
Hi,
And thanks for the tip about the wrong home folder in my last thread. I'm
now attempting to fix some things related to that but am running into
problems again. I'm trying to move or copy my eSpeak installation from the
home folder to usr/bin.
It seems my ordinary user account has no rights to do that. So my question
is, how do I perform some Gnome commands as the super user such as when
copying or editing files? I cannot see a run as command or something
similar.
I read that there are some sudo frontends such as gksu but have failed to
find them. Amazingly the book Beginning Ubuntu Linux, although it gives
plenty of examples of using sudo itself, does not cover its graphical
equivalent as far as I can tell. SO what's the Gnome equivalent of sudo used
in Gnome and how do I use it? All of my sighted LInux friends are using KDE,
and they bash Gnome big time wishing that QT4 would catch on. They also seem
to know very little about Gnome itself, which is a pitty. Well I'd use KDE
myself, if I could. Still waiting for that to happen.
I've tried copying via the command-line but managed to mess up something, I
think. I ran the following:;
/usr/bin$ sudo cp -r ~vtatila/*
Password:
cp: target `/home/vtatila/speak' is not a directory
Mind you my command-line background is in DOs and command-line ports of
Windows apps. So in that context it would copy all the files specified by
the wildcard to the current folder . But this is Unix. And I realized too
late that it Expands wildcards into a flat list of arguments (which always
makes me want to draw analogies to passing arrays in Perl subs). The copy
syntax is:
cp [OPTION]... SOURCE... DIRECTORY
So I truely hope it interpreted all the matching files but one as the source
and tried to use the last one, as the target folder. SO no real harm done.
But not confirming by default, having no undo like the Bin in Windows and
not being verbose when you work interactively in the shell is getting on my
nerves. I was afraid I did something fatal so obviously root powers aren't
really good for me at this point, <smile>. At times I can identify very
strongly with the Unix haters handbook.
Needless to say I'd rather do this stuff via the GUI to play it safe. SO
back to my question again, how do I run super-user stuff in Gnome without
having to give my ordinary user account too many rights? Also, on a side
note, is there an invert selection command in Gnome? It would rock if I need
to select all but very few files. Currently my Windows magnifier only tracks
the VmWare mouse so it makes many keybord operations in Gnome very difficult
to follow because it means manual tracking with the magnified mouse.
BTW: Are threads like this OT? I do realize very little about this is truely
specific to Linux accessibility. If this is a problem, I'm perfectly willing
to take those of my questions, which have no direct bearing on
accessibility, to some other newbie-friendly list, too. I can also be less
verbose, although generally speaking I liek to compose long mails on most
lists, as you might have noticed.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
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