Mounting and Command Line text editing

[eddiefisher41]

Hey Guys.
Recently got myself Debian4.0 with KDE. Working pretty well. I can mount my USB drives etc fine however when trying to edit fstab in order to auto mount these devices i come across a problem.

If i open kwrite (KDE text editor) and navigate to the correct file at /etc/fstab i can edit the file but i do not have permission to save the new file. I find this odd as i am the administrator user of the computer and hence by directory is root.

From the mounting USB devices tutorial on these pages i know that i should be doing this from command line.
The tutorial is slightly different as it uses gedit.
This is what my terminal tells me when i invoke kwrite on the fstab file.

edwardfisher@localhost:~$ su
Password:
localhost:/home/edwardfisher# kwrite /etc/fstab
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

kwrite: cannot connect to X server :0.0
localhost:/home/edwardfisher

From reading the tutorial it seems i need to be in root directory hence:

localhost:/home/edwardfisher# cd /
localhost:/# ls
bin dev initrd lost+found opt sbin sys var
boot etc initrd.img media proc selinux tmp vmlinuz
cdrom home lib mnt root srv usr
localhost:/# cd /root
(change directory to root folder with password(see above))
localhost:~# kwrite /etc/fstab
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

kwrite: cannot connect to X server :0.0
localhost:~#

OK so as mentioned i can mount my USB drives etc fine however when i come to automount i cannot save the edited fstab file.

In the tutorial it mentions:
in terminal type as root: gedit /etc/fstab
What does it mean by type as root? and Is my above method completely wrong?


Any help much appreciated.

Cheers.
Ed

[glennzo]

Hi EddieFisher. As root means to open a terminal and log in as root, then type the command gedit /etc/fstab. The error you see,

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

is something I've experienced in Fedora, but usually one time only. Seems like it happens just after an install when I'm doing first time configuration. A reboot seems to fix this 'error' so I wouldn't worry about it right now.

[eddiefisher41]

Thanks Glennzo.
I take it that changing to root when in terminal uses the su command, or thats what i thought anyway.
After a reboot the same error message is displayed.

edwardfisher@localhost:~$ su
Password:
localhost:/home/edwardfisher# kwrite /etc/fstab
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

kwrite: cannot connect to X server :0.0

Cheers.
Ed

[glennzo]

Yes, changing to root means typing su or su -. su gives you root powers with the current path, su - gives you root powers with root's path. Is there another text editor you could try? I'm a Gnome user. Don't use KDE too often.

[eddiefisher41]

Ok so finally got kwrite to save the fstab file. All seemed fine.
So i do a reboot expecting fstab to auto mount the usb drive.

However when i navigate to the drive using Konqueror i get this message:

"Could not enter folder /mnt/usbflash."

The thing is that the drive comes up fine in the navigator complete with a little usb icon etc.

Any ideas?

[glennzo]

In a terminal dmesg | grep mount might tell you something. Also the mount command will tell you what's currently mounted. How about posting your /etc/fstab file in a reply here, cat /etc/fstab in a terminal. Also, is the USB drive EXT3, NTFS or FAT32?