You know how Kubuntu/Ubuntu is set up to use sudo rather than root access? Well, I discovered a neat little trick to bypass that in Kubuntu, as follows: You run "kdesu konqueror" from the "run" dialog box, then navigate till you see your folder of interest in the main window, for example, "/etc/timidity" . right click on that folder, and from "actions", pick "open a terminal here". This opens a terminal with ROOT ACCESS to the folder you need to work in. No more constant sudo this and sudo that and passwords every five minutes. Right-click actions are all root level from here, so you can open files in Kate and edit them with root priviledges. Hey, I'm a n00b! This may have been obvious, but it was new, and surprising, to me. So much for sudo preventing root access. You guys would have had a good laugh at me, trying to use "rename" from the terminal, to rename a bunch of files for a GUS patch set that was all in capitol letters. I spent all afternoon unsuccessfully trying to get it to work. I never DID get mv to work for renaming, due to the nature of what I was trying to do. I finally hit the sweet-spot by using "rename '/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/' *" I know there had to be an easier way, but I've not learned to write my own shell scripts as of yet. All the documentation on the perl rename script are... inadequate, to say the least. Oh well, at least I can play prboom with midi music now. The freepat patch set is incomplete, and the soundfont won't play in prboom, though it plays fine in timidity. A question however, when I tried to install doom legacy, I had a problem when I tried to "./bootstrap"; no such file or directory. Just about everything that needs compiled needs ./bootstrap, evidently. I'm still in shock that gnu make wasn't installed by default in Kubuntu, and I'm wondering what else I need to tell Adept to get for me.
you could also use su instead of sudo, which will keep you logged in as a superuser (root) for as long as you need.
Another trick for those of us with Debian-based systems like Knoppix or Ubuntu, useful for the annoying tendency of Thunderbird to use Konqueror instead of Firefox to open links. No scripts, no muss, no fuss. open a konsole and type this: update-alternatives --config x-www-browser It will give you a list of installed browsers. Just pick the number for firefox, and you're set. You'd think the kde components part of "system settings" would have done this, but noooOOOOooo! Edit: Also, I'm really liking the "glowy wine" theme for Firefox. I wish they had it for Thunderbird as well.
Its intended as a security measure. Sure its more convenient, but sudo is supposed to be a lot safer (I haven't studied the relative merits much)
Speaking of safety, which firewall helper do you all use? I tried out Guarddog, since Automatix slammed it onto my system as part of the "security package", but I find I like Firestarter better, even if the "GTKSu" login acts weird at best... I'm way to much of a n00b to try editing IP Tables without a pacifier... I was so annoyed at myself, I blew away my previous install, figuring I must have done something to get rid of lndir, but it turns out that lndir just wasn't a part of any Ubuntu since Hoary. Now I get to reinstall all that crappola for my mail and browser, as well as all the games I'd installed. Live and learn. EDIT: Question - Is this normal, having "no such directory" at the end of one's $PATH statement, like this? /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games: No such file or directory
Addendum: I noticed when I moved my local folders files for Thunderbird over to Linux, that it seems to handle filenames with spaces just fine. Is the old Linux addage of not putting spaces in filenames finally passe? At least for newer stuff?
If there is any current software around that can't handle spaces in filenames I'd be very surprised, it's not been a problem for years. You can actually do stuff with Linux filenames that you can't do in Windows - if you really want to name a file ":" or "<>", you can do it
