Hi everyone, my name is Derek Atherton and I have just bought a new EeePC 4G, running Xandros. I keep getting a message saying " I don't have permissions to certain tasks like; saving work to USB memory stick, can't see any document on my USB memory stick. I'm new to how to change permissions and how to write the code for them. Please can anybody help me. Thanks Derek Atherton.

Get rid of the dumbed-down Xandros that came with it and install a "real" Linux distro.

Ubuntu and Mint are usually good choices for beginners.

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The permissions error can be resolved by performing the task as root user or by changing the permissions. If you can't see anything on the usb it is probably not mounted.

If you don't know how to do this, post back.

I'd agree with MTK358 about getting a more current and better supported distributions.

check and see if the usb drive is mounted, use df

I am not sure a new distro would be right for a newbie just yet. I caution you on that until you get some more training.

In most distro's a common user may or may not have rights to mount the usb as read/write. In some distro's you have to right click on the usb in the gui then scroll down to see mount as write (or such words).

Use df -h This might not be easy to resolve due to hardware limitations and not just the small size of the hard drive. This netbook put a lot of people off Linux when it first came out. The O/S is a commercial mish-mash designed to run on small (+spec.) machines. You should still be able to run a terminal, either from a graphical window or by pressing ctrl+Alt+F2 (F7 to go back) and as root (sudo/su) run lshw, lspci, or demidecode. The later, hopefully, will tell you if the bios is reading the usb ports, or it could just be a duff usb stick.

Fred.

Of course it can be difficult to install a new distro, but I also wouldn't recommend to use a distro that is discontinued since 2007 and has very outdated software on it.