Another thing they don’t feel like telling you on their wonderful walk throughs.
About 80% of the commands they give you need to have the “sudo” command before them, or the command they told you to run either, wont or it will run, and not do what they said it would because it’s not being run with elevated permissions.

Once in a while I do see one that says at the beginning “the following commands assume your running as root” or something to that effect. But the majorities just list our codes and what they should do, while secretly their original writers are snickering away in some office or home somewhere that they didn’t give you the secret sauce and consequently just cost you another X hours of work redoing the whole thing, now as root.

This is the same group of people who for some reason are scared to death of someone actually using the root account as just that, a real user account who can DO something to this system.

I appreciate a good practical joke as well as the next person, but come on guy’s I think its been enough years of this. This is a petition to every walk through writer out there to list out the ACTUAL steps required and save n00bs hours of their lives. We were all there at some point.

So, linux doesn’t like you playing with permissions.

It demonstrates this every time you try to do anything with permissions. Any of you used to a graphical interface are probably used to the interface changing something graphically once you’ve changed permissions. Oh no, too simple young Windows user. Once you click apply in the pretty graphical version in linux, most of the boxes turn grey again, or go back to their default value.

Now before you pull your hair out trying the same steps with a few variations, consult Google on how to check permissions, and may I up front recommend doing it through the terminal, somewhere that shows you the permissions, though ugly, very efficient.

At terminal navigate to the directory then type in

ls -l

Silly as it seems, this lists the permissions out nicely.

For more information consult here, or here.

So, now that you know what the permissions are, lets change them.

sudo chown /path/to/end/folder/here/ UserNameHere

sudo chown -R UserNameHere .

and yes that period matters, and yes you’ll need to enter a password next.

The first line sets ownership to a given user, teh next line forces those permissions to everyhting below it, files, folders, everything.