Quote:
Originally Posted by dEnDrOn
(Post 4403069)
a) log in as root
b) type xhost + (command xhost, argument +)
c) then type the command
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This is
not a good idea: "xhost +" will
turn off acccess control, which means that any remote host may have access to your X server. In a sense, doing that lowers your security by allowing more freedom to outsiders, who might want to misuse that freedom. If you absolutely must resort to that, remember to reverse it after you're done by
Quote:
Originally Posted by dEnDrOn
(Post 4404311)
this fedora15 login box is so ugly & ancient.....i just can't take it :doh::doh:
please suggest something...
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In addition to the wallpaper, you can apparently change the GTK theme of the login screen. See
this for a reference. That's still not modifying the login screen too much, but depending on the theme (which might be customized by you) it does make a change. More complex changes would probably require one to get more involved with how GDM (in Gnome 3) actually works, but I hope the theme+wallpaper change helps you out a little. It seems it is becoming a (nasty) habit that whatever they make these days for desktop Linux systems, it is bound to be candy-looking, complex and impossibly difficult to customize beyond pre-defined changes. Gone are the days when one could simply fire up a text editor, change some plaintext things in a config file and possibly restart a program or service to get what was wanted (well, thankfully some things, like certain "lightweight" window managers, still allow this).
To add to the talk about filenames and copying to directories under /usr and such:
- when a program needs to access a file somewhere in the filesystem, the program can do it only if it has permissions to do so (they are set separately for owner of the file, group, and other users); files under a user's home directory are typically writable only by that user (sometimes may be readable by others!), and files under /usr (as an example) only writable by root. Login manager is typically run as a user and/or group that is created for that purpose. That user/group may not have access to regular user(s) home directory(/ies), and so any (theme/wallpaper/config) files that the program needs to have access to cannot reside in such directories. On the other hand, if they are placed inside /usr and given such permissions that the login-screen process user can access them, all is good. However regular users cannot write to that directory (if they could, any user could trash the system severely), so in order to place the files there, "higher" user account must be used: the user should temporarily become either the user who owns the directory, belong in a group that has access to it, or simply become root who has access to every file (could be the directory owner!). Another way is to ask the owner-user to do the changes somehow, but typically the owner is a "system account" that does not actually have any connections to humans :) Two main ways exist to do this: using the "su" to temporarily change the user you are, or "sudo" (if configured) to simply run a command with another user's privileges. I prefer the latter, because it's faster if configured properly, and allows for more security and flexibility (no need to give out root account password, for example, to run a specific command that requires root privileges)
- filenames on Unix systems are case-sensitive, so "a" and "A" are two different things (except if a program is written explicitly to treat them the same way)
- arguments to programs are typically separated by whitespaces, so
/Dirname with spaces/ as an argument to a command (such as cp) does not stand for a single directory name (as you might expect), but actually three separate pieces,
/Dirname,
with and
spaces/. In addition to spaces there are a few other characters that the shells typically treat in a special way (dollar sign $, backslash \, semicolon ;, and so on). Because of their special meaning, one must explicitly tell when they should
not be interpreted as anything special, if that is wanted. There are two main ways for this: first is to precede the special character with a backslash (e.g., \\ means backslash that is not to be interpreted as anything special, but the character backslash, whereas single \ might be interpreted for example as a linebreak). For long filenames with lots of spaces and such this might be tedious, so another way is to enclose the string into quotes, inside which the characters are not treated in a special way:
"two words" is one piece consisting of two strings and a space-character in between, whereas
two words (without quotes) is two separate pieces, each of which consists of a string. Got it? In addition it may make difference what sort of quoting marks you use: backticks ``, double quotes "" and single quotes '' can all have a different meaning (for example, in the same order, output of a command, string where variables are extended, and string where that is not done). If you want to check this, try these in a bash shell (default in many places):
Code:
date=thisday # set variable called "date" to value "thisday"
echo date
echo $date
echo "$date"
echo '$date'
echo `date`
echo `$date`
- TAB completion works in some shells such as bash, and is a handy way to get past the special mark escaping: write a few letters from the beginning of (for example) a filename, press TAB (or whatever the completion key is set to be), and the shell completes that filename as far as it can, escaping any special letters
- pay attention to the error messages you get. If you try a command and the shell says "... is not a directory", then the argument you gave in the last command is not a directory: it could be a regular file, for example. Or if you get "no such directory", it means that the path you wrote does not exist and needs to be created first. If you don't get any message at all, it is usually a sign that everything went smoothly.
