Change Permissions on a new hard drive to allow write...Problem Solved

[Jeffrey F. Bloss]

mtyoung wrote:

> Jeffrey,
> 
> Please tell how I could have solved the problem without logging in as 
> root. I'd really like to learn.

You'd use sudo or one of its graphical derivatives, just like everyone
has been trying to explain. The terminal way to do it would include...

"sudo chown owner:group target" changes ownership of "target".

"sudo chmod xxxx target" changes the permissions of target.

"sudo vim somefile" opens vim with admin permissions and loads somefile.

Those three commands could have been used to do everything you did
logging in as root. Changing the ownership and permissions of a
partition and editing fstab so it's mounted at startup. A quick and
dirty way of getting a list of all your mounted partitions and
their mount points is to use df. As in "df -a". If you need to see a
list of all hardware attached to your system and its logical name
because you can't see something any other way you can use lshw. Should
be run "sudo lshw" to see everything.

The fancy graphical way would be to load whatever disk or file manager
program you're using gksudo. As in "gksudo tuxcmd" to load my favorite
looks-and-feels-like-mc tool. You could just as easily do the same
thing with Nautilus. If you find yourself doing this a lot like you do
when first installing the OS or certain software, there's even a nifty
little Gnome-Panel applet for launching commands that aren't on your
menus. I think it's called "Run Application". I'm sure there's a KDE
version if you're one of those who prefer KDE. It will even remember the
last few commands you issued through it, just like using the up and down
arrows do at the command prompt. :)

There's two advantages to doing things this way rather than "logging
in as root". Your admin activities are limited to the application you
call and its session, and you never type your root account password.
Neither one of these may seem like a big deal to you, but it will when
you've experienced first hand ome of the bad things that can happen.
As others have pointed out, the *nix permission/access method didn't
evolve in a vacuum. There's decades of logic and real life scenario
behind it. 

-- 
     _?_      Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
    (o o)         Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
-oOO-(_)--OOo-------------------------------[ Groucho Marx ]--
    grok!              Registered Linux user #402208
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