How to log into Mandrake as ROOT ?

[SonyBoy 0]

Hi,

 

I'm a beginner with Linux and I would like to change the permissions of some folders (on another partition) to make them writable (change to 777).

 

The only way to do it is to log as ROOT if I understand correctly. But, sorry if it does seem silly for you, I don't know how to log as root.

 

Could anyone help ?

 

 

 

[taeuler 0]

There should be several ways to do this. Log on with root as your username at your logon screen, and enter your root password. I havn't used mandrake but that is how Suse RH9 ARCH and gentoo are. You can also achieve your goal of changeing file permissions two other ways.

 

The way I usually do something like this is to open up shell console, type "su" to get root permission and then do

"exec /"location of your file browser" and modify your permission. I have only done this with konqueror(KDE).

You can also do chmod +777 /filename or folder. Which will give write permission to all users.

[SonyBoy 0]

Thank you very much.

 

I used the chmod function but it doesn't appear to like it when I try to change the attributes of folders on a NTFS (windows) partition.

 

Is it possible for linux to modify a file on a NTFS partition ?

[taeuler 0]

The 2.6 kernel does have NTFS write support. Although I don't know how Mandrake sets that up. I've heard some people have had issues with NTFS write, but I don't have a fat32/NTFS partion so I can't help too much more with that.

[danleff 0]

I can tell you from my experience that Mandrake 10 (if that is the version that you have) does not write to NTFS partitions.

 

You are better off making a fat32 partition to share files between Linux and Windows. This way, you can access these files from Windows XP and Mandrake. I would avoid trying to write to NTFS, especially with critical files.

[martouf 0]

danger, will robinson!

 

writing to NTFS is still dangerous to the health of your filesystem.

 

last I read about it, the driver still has problems allocating new NTFS space

for files. It's safe only to overwrite existing files and only so long as the

new contents are no larger than the old contents.