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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