File access permissions
 

Driving me up the wall! I can see the directories and contents of my windows drives when logged in as root, but cannot access them when signed in normally. Similarly, I cannot access the /usr/local folder to install firefox there, so it's on my desktop somewhere. Am I doing something wrong.

Then comes the sound... I'll trawl forums more for that and get back to you :)

A user should definetly NOT be able to put a file in /usr/local
Type
su -
and enter the root password to do that sort of thing.

For your windows drive add umask=0000 to the options for that drive in the /etc/fstab file. If you are unsure post the contents of that file and I will help.

How do I do that when installing firefox? Just put the su in terminal, then install?

Here's the appropriate section of my /etc/fstab

/dev/hda1 /win-c ntfs ro 1 0
/dev/hda5 /win-d ntfs ro 1 0
/dev/hda6 /win-e vfat defaults 1 0

For firefox, it's all according to how you are installing it. Is it an install script that you run? If so, then run as root and let it install to that directory.

/dev/hda1 /win-c ntfs ro,user,umask=0222 0 0
/dev/hda5 /win-d ntfs ro,user,umask=0222 0 0
/dev/hda6 /win-e vfat defaults,user,umask=0000 0 0