i found out that whenever i 'su', i can't run my own apps unless i exit. for instance if i wanted to gedit a config file, after i 'su' and run gedit i get:

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0.0

i use slackware 8.1/win2k.

Also, i have a fat partition which i use to swap files between linux and windows. as a normal user i can't copy to or edit files in my fat partition unless i'm root. i tried chmod but the permissions did not change!
i would like to be able to have read-write access to my fat as a normal user just like i did when running mandrake 7.x

Not being able to run/edit, etc. another users files or programs would be considered normal in Linux because of security.

To mount your FAT partition for everybody to read/write/delete you have to tell the system when the file system is mounted to allow it. Use a mask to set the access bits. Try to modify your fstab mount entry point to include the option something like below:

/dev/hda3 /fat vfat users,noauto,umask=000 0 0

Change above what you need for your system of course. But the main new item is the umask setting.

Cheers!

Try "$ su -" instead of just "$ su"

Add something similar to your /etc/fstab:
#filesystem mount-point fs-type options dump fsck-order
/dev/hdaX /mnt/dos vfat defaults,rw,user 0 0

Replace "user" with "users" if you want to allow anyone to unmount the partition. If you don't want this live it this way ("user").
For more info "$ man 5 fstab"

The message says that don't have permisson to open your X display, so before exec the command, you will need with your user give access to your X:

# xhost +

and to direct your variable as root:

# export DISPLAY=:0

Hope that helps ...

I found this thread pretty helpfull, but did not completely fix my problem. I am mounting a vfat partition to share files between zp and redhat 8.0. I could not allow non-root users to write to this partition. I tried both methods proposed by vladkrack and pesho_p respectibly. Both methods allowed write access for non-root users, but I can not change the user or group of this partition. So the user is still listed as root, but my user does have write access.

My fstab entry is this:

/dev/hdf1 /home/Sean/media vfat defaults,rw,users 0 0

Thanks for any help.

Sean

yeah. add umask=000 to the vfat line

you might also try mounting the drive manually with

# mount -o umask=0000 /dev/hda1 /home/Sean/media