Complete Newbie & New Install

[reed9]

If you want a user with full admin powers, the thing to do is use sudo.

(I'm linking to the Arch wiki as the easiest guide I know of. Everything but how to install it should be applicable to any distro.)

You should either leave the root account alone or disable it. I don't know how Mandriva is setup, so you might run into issues disabling the root account.

[dannn]

To be honest I'm having a hard time fathoming this. However I just re installed it after some effort and now have new accounts with these permissions. Are they correct?

drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 2009-10-27 22:48 Desktop/
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 2009-10-27 21:32 Documents/
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 2009-10-27 21:32 Download/
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 2009-10-27 21:32 Music/
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 2009-10-27 21:32 Pictures/
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 2009-10-27 21:32 Templates/
drwx------ 9 user user 4096 2009-10-27 22:56 tmp/
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 2009-10-27 21:32 Videos/

I am no longer getting that error, but managed to delete my entire Vista installation with all my files. But never mind.

I set up a partition with ext3 at about 150GB and a swap file partition at 4GB, but I'm not sure if Linux will use the swap file I made by default. It is not asking me for a swap file. I hope it uses it. What is happening there? Is there any way I can link it to it?

I also intend to put Vista back on the other 350GB on NTFS, and keep it this time.

[reed9]

Those are the default permissions, so far as I know. I think the issue before had something to do with how you created your user/admin accounts.

It sounds like you set up the paritioning scheme yourself? When you select your mount points, you can choose to mount a partition as swap - the system will set it up after that.

You can look at your /etc/fstab file to see where your partition are being mounted. For example, mine looks like

#
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system>        <dir>         <type>    <options>          <dump> <pass>
none                   /dev/pts      devpts    defaults            0      0
none                   /dev/shm      tmpfs     defaults            0      0

#/dev/cdrom             /media/cd   auto    ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0
#/dev/dvd               /media/dvd  auto    ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0
#/dev/fd0               /media/fl   auto    user,noauto             0      0

UUID=29a01537-e1cf-40fc-a011-bfc85d6b7881 swap swap defaults 0 0
UUID=2a2db825-a87a-49be-953c-9182a1ace47d /home ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
UUID=79a75367-bca1-49c1-88fb-812d05174c4d / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1

[dannn]

i tried doing fstab from both user and admin i.e su and it says permission denied.

[reed9]

How do you mean tried? It's a text file, I only meant you can look at it in a text editor to see how it's setup. To write changes to the file you would need to be root, but your user should be able to read the file.

[dannn]

# Entry for /dev/sda1 :
UUID=e4a92487-f663-4909-bb0a-71477d42b421 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sda5 :
UUID=046a198c-9ea1-4b8a-a2f2-9292a5c78130 swap swap defaults 0 0

There is my file. I was trying to access it from the command line, sorry. So it looks to me like I did setup swap.

[reed9]

Linux uses text files for most all configuration. You can look at them from the command line, using for example, the cat command.

cat /etc/fstab

Or you can use use a ommand line text editor like nano. Which is how I almost always view and edit text files.

[dannn]

Thanks Reed9, I'm glad to be getting somewhere with your help.

Can you please tell me if those default permissions are safe and secure?