whats going on?
 

argh, now ive done it.
i installed nvidia 4191 drivers. they worked. good :D . then whilst on a roll i decided to try and 'play' (read 'tamper') with more bits of linux :jawa: . i did a few things as per a jetblackz how-to :study: (only my stupidity had mucked things up, the how-to is cool);
1./ i did the security improvements by uninstalling apache, fetchmail, inetd,openssh,portmap,samba,2x sendmail's.
2./ i went on to try and get the sound & APM working by enabling the modprobe emu10k1 & APM bits respectively, then did
chmod 660 /dev/dsp
chmod 660 /sbin/modprobe emu10k1
...BUT...
ya see, i might have accidentally mistyped the second one as:
chmod 660 /sbin/modprobe
as the first attempt said it couldnt find the file or something.
then i tried startx but it didnt load and gave this;
"(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the NVdriver kernel module!"
i hunted through the nvidia readme and it mentioned this... basically it didnt help though as i did initially had the new drivers working fine. so i tried to 'reinstall' (the idea of doing this is probably a mindowz hangover, probably a bad linux method of fixing stuff), and upon trying to re-'make install' in theNVIDIA_kernel... folder it said permession was denied to:
/sbin/lsmod
/sbin/modprobe
so this sounds as if it has to do with the chmod-ing i tried to do above.. but maybe have done it to something i shouldn't have.
i then got back into X by reverting to the standard NV display drivers. but not i couldn't get online... pants! so i then manually reinstalled the 8 programs (eventually! :) ) i had previously removed and reinstated the lines in the /etc/inetd.conf file. but still i cant get online in linux, i had to revert to mindowz to do this ( :eek: ).
here's the pppd dial-up error:
"
The pppd daemon died unexpectedly!
Exit status: 4
See 'man pppd' for an explanation of the error codes
or take a look at the kppp FAQ on
http://devel-home.kde.org/~kppp/index.html
"
sorry for the long post, thanks for any help in advance.

IIRC, chmod 660 gives full access to everyone in the group that owns the file.

A quick check of the modprobe binary (ls -l) shows that it is a link to insmod. I'd recommend reinstalling the package modutils, just to be safe.

The reason you probably couldn't get online is because the modules can't be loaded, since insmod is broken.

FYI, when you change the permissions on a symlink, it actually changes the permissions on the original file.

You can put the executable permission back with:

chmod 755 /sbin/insmod

first number = owner
second number = group
third number = others

1= execute
2= write
4= read

7= execute + write + read

I hope this helps

-Milo

EDIT:
corrected error

YES! wow, it's working again! the chmod 755 /sbin/insmod' did the trick, thanks very very much, you're a genius! uugh, now linux has sound and nvidia 4191 driver tasty goodness, uuuugh. now for getting quake1&2 to run...
genius, genuis!