Dear co-groupers,

I would like to ask you for some help.
I have been using linux for some time now however I used to use my root account for all operations. Now I wanted to try something new and created another - user - account. Of course it has some default rights which means it doesn't have too much rights... Now I know I have to give my user account some additional rights to perform some operations, e.g. start X Windows or watch movies using mplayer.

My question is: how do I know which rights should I give to what file to do something? For example I tried to play a movie using mplayer and it does not allow me to do it. Some files require permission to read/write/execute them. How do I learn which file "attributes" to alter in order to be able to watch movies?

Thank you for all your help in advance.

Best regards,
Sebastian

1) Is X Windows starting for root but not for a user?

2) The movies have to be in a directory accessible by user. You do not want to give a user access rights to roots home directory if that where you put them.

What I did was create a folder (as root) such as
/usr/allusers

set the permissions using
chmod 755 /usr/allusers

Then you can put whatever you want in the directory and all users can access it.

If something in that directory gives you a "permission denied" error
just do a
chmod 755
on it

For more info on file ownership and permissions see here;
http://www.peakpeak.com/~jallen/rhla...ation.html#1.2

Dear darthtux,

Thank you for your reply.

As for your questions, yes - the "X's" do work in root, and do not work in user mode.

As for the movies - I'll have to check if the directory is accessible for anybody, but maybe it is the video driver or the sound driver which is not accessible by all users? Or maybe mplayer itself should have its permissions changed for it to work should any user want to start it? What do you think about that?

Thanks for your help.

Best regards,
Sebastian