I'm a rookie when it comes to linux. My question is, I have a partition /downloads. I do not have access to this to save downloaded files in there. I was wondering how can I set my user to have access to files/folders? Thanks in advance.

as root you can chown to your user... that'll give you ownership of the directory.. it would look like this:

chown yourusername:yourusergroup /downloads

you can ls -l to see what's there already, and help diagnose the problem...


of course this will not work if /downloads is a mount point (which i'm assuming it's not)

Or, if /downloads is a mount point (and it is mounting at boot), then add umask=0 to the options list of the proper line of your fstab file.
You would need to become root, then open up fstab, which will be in the /etc directory (/etc/fstab).

In fstab you will see a number of entries that look similar to this:
Where "hdxx" corresponds to a hard-drive partition and could be many different letter/number combinations like "hda1" or "hdb3". Each "option" could be any number of different things as well, and fs_type is the file-system type for each partition.

If /downloads is a mount point set to mount on boot, then one of your fstab lines will look like this:
Simply add umask=0 like so:
umask=0 makes that mount read/writeable by any user on your system. There are other ways of doing it too, but umask feels like it has more finess.

If the filetype is vfat (fat32) then you can make yourself the owner of the partition of the by adding a 'uid=' option in the fstab entry. You can use either your uid number or your username.

With a GUI log in as root, right click the dir, go to the permissions tab and change to user.

no offense, but that's what i hate about GUIs in linux... they give people an uninformed alternative to actually learning how to do something. moreover, that won't work with all the mount-point chatter above. Permissions aren't difficult to learn, and quite logical to follow. invest the time.

Hey guys I truly appreciate all your suggestions. This would help me a lot.

Since we're in the topic of permissions and such is there a way to give my user account root privileges accross the OS? I hate to always have to change to root for any little thing I want to do with the system. I just basically want to learn to do this just so I can determine if my user account does need root privileges or not after trying it.

This is not a good idea! Then you can work as root anyway, there is no difference.

Believe me, it makes sense to have user- and root-permissions separated. As secesh said already: invest some time to learn about permissions and you'll have a far more stable system to enjoy for a long time

I wouldn't recommend that. I destroyed several systems early on from messing around too much as root.
After a while you get used to having to switch, and you come to appreciate the safe-guards. By the way, you don't have to logout/login to get root access, the su command is your friend. If you know enough command line to su to root and then pull up a file manager (ie: konqueror), then things become quite easy.

I have never done it, but I assume that giving your user root privilages accross-the-board would be as simple as pulling up kuser and adding yourself to the root group.

You can use 'sudo' to execute a single command as root. It is setup by using the 'visudo' program (with is actually vi). The file you edit has several commented examples, and you may be able to simply delete the '# ' charactors before the line without making any other changes.
You may want to make yourself a member of the 'wheel' group.

The 'sudoers' file may have an info page on your system.