Hello everybody and thanks for the help rec'd so far.

I have another newbie question,....but first the background:

Skill Level: Newbie
Distribution: Mandrake 8.0
GUI: KDE

Anyways, here's the thing, during intallation, Mandrake either didn't allow me, or I didn't see a place to set the level of permissions I have as a user. As such, I'm having a real hair-pulling-out time getting plug-ins to plug in to my browser (Mozilla v 0.9.1), or just as frustrating, adding users to Licq, or other such 'simple' & routine tasks. I'm having no problems doing these tasks when logged on as root, but the changes are not pulling forward to my user acct (not that I expected them to). So, my question's are:

1) is there a way to check and see what I am and am not allowed to do to my computer while logged on as a user vs. root, and....

2) how can I go about changing my user privilages to allow more freedom to play around (assuming this is possible).

I'd like to avoid having to go into a terminal to perform every little tweak to a program (not that I'm scared of such, I was running around in MSDOS long before windows became a standard).

Thanks....Robert.

Try running those programs in the console (konsole in kde), and when you try to do whatever you dont have permission for, look in the console window. it should say a bunch of stuff followed by ' directory/blah' and then permission denied. get on a console as root (super user) and type

chmod 777 directory/blah


or whatever it said in the quotes when it gave you the permission denied error. i hope i explained that easily, if i didnt, im sure someone else cna explain it better.

In my limited experience, I have not been able to change permissions globally. However, it has not been a big problem for me, when I run into permission denied situations to make the necessary changes so that permission is granted. Here's what I do:
I get a message "permission denied"
I find out where the file resides by issuing the following command in a terminal window:
# whereis [filename]
or
# find / -name [filename]
Once find out where the file is located, I issue the following command:
#chmod 777 [filename]
I use KDE, and here is how I check permissions after I have done the above:
Using KDE GUI, find the file I want to check. Right click on it. Click permissions.

Hope this helps
Post again if it doesn't

I'm having a similar sort of problem on my system. I'm running Debian w/ Gnome GUI. I used linuxconf to grant my alternate user "super user" privileges, but somehow I find that there are still certain things that I can only do as root (such as alter /etc/fstab or use apt-get to install new software packages). This, to me, doesn't seem like much of a superuser. I can live without being able to overwrite certain files, but installing software is something I do often enough that I don't want to have to su everytime. Is there a way I can work around this without changing permissions for every file or directory?

cheers,

mike.

I've been fighting with this one for a while myself. Being a Windows user trying to convert to Linux, there are a few things still holding me to Windows.

1.) In Windows...you can change any user to an Admin (or root equivalent). It a pain in the ass that I have to keep switching to the root user or typing su in order to install things. Even RPMs give me problems.

2.) All the frickin dependencies when installing programs. Again...in Windows, all programs downloaded have all the necessary files to install and run. Makes no sense that I have to download 80 dependencies and install them in the proper order. I understand keeping file size down and the various versions of Linux may not be compat with certain dependencies but I would think everyone would be running the latest greatest or at least only a few releases prior. If not...their loss.

3.) You know...I don't have any other issues with Linux. Linux is awesome and I want to switch but those are my grips.

Sorry...keep the peace...and Go Linux!

One last thing...in the newer releases of Red Hat...I notice there is the XF86Config and the XF86Config-4 . Which one is the one being used? Can I delete one to avoid troubleshooting confusion? I'm guessing I can kill the XF86Config since it's older. I just haven't tried yet. Any ideas?

And again...please don't flame me. I hate Windows. I was just blowing off a little steam.

" 2.) All the frickin dependencies when installing programs. Again...in Windows, all programs downloaded have all the necessary files to install and run. Makes no sense that I have to download 80 dependencies and install them in the proper order. I understand keeping file size down and the various versions of Linux may not be compat with certain dependencies but I would think everyone would be running the latest greatest or at least only a few releases prior. If not...their loss."

see, that's why I decided to go with Debian, using the apt-get utility it automatically gets all related packages and installs them for you. it even cleans up after itself.

but this is off topic, am I to conclude from your reply that it isn't possible to give a non-root user complete system control?

Or you could just install all the packages from the source file (i.e., {packagename}.tar.gz ) and run ./configure && make && make test && make install and you won't have to worry about dependencies because their included in the source.

I beg to differ with you,

In Windows you can't become root, only a superfical admin, you can't touch sytem files, you can't over haul your system from under the hood so-to-spaek.


And dependances are not resolved when installing, Often times two programs will clash and cause all sorts of strange effects. Even drivers for hardware will do that sometimes.

Now I realise I'm off topic but I came here to this thread for the topic. Yet I find it's dealing with a different OS. But I'll still ask.

How can I tell what groups are availaible to add to my user, on my system. This is a command line question. If I were in KDE I'd just use Kuser Manager. But I don't have KDE installed on this Slackware box.