I am new to Linux and have been working on getting things set up. I have been trying to get samba to work with my xp and the best I have been able to get is xp to see it but I get an error saying that I do not have permission and to check with your administrator. I have found several helps on the samba but they all require editing the conf file and I used to be able to access the file with sudo command but now all the sudden I am not able to get any response from the sudo command. I can access the file and bring it up in the text editor but I can not save the file then because I do not have permission. I don't understand why this is happening????

There is also another thing going on with my laptop. Ever since I installed Ubuntu 8.04.1, my hard drive is running all the time. What is this doing and what can I do to stop this? I don't want to wear out my hard drive early.

Would reinstalling the system again help these out. I have installed a lot of software from the Synaptic Package Manager. Could there be something with the installation? I was thinking of reinstalling the system anyway because I found that there was a Ubuntu christian edition that I was wanting to install. I am not sure what the differences are but I was thinking of trying it anyway. I see that DanGuardian is integrated into it and I tried installing it on Ubuntu that I have on the system but I don't know if it is working or running.

Well thank you all.

The first thing to fix is the drive running. After startup, open a terminal and run "ps -e" to see what processes are running. Also, try "top".

I don't know what the issue with sudo might be, but I prefer to never use it. In Ubuntu, the root account is disabled by default, but can easily be turned on with "sudo passwd root". (Yes, you will have to get sudo working to do this**) Once the root account is enabled, just enter "su" to get into super-user mode.

**If you need to get things working without fixing sudo, you can get into the root account by booting into single-user mode. At the boot menu, go into edit mode, and add "single" to the kernel line, and re-boot. The system will come up in the root account with no password required. Then you can enter a root password using "passwd".
The alternate method is to boot from live CD and edit the /etc/passwd file. The edited entry for root will look like this:
root::0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
(Removed the character between the first 2 colons)
This allows login to the root account with no password.