Folder Permission Issues

[esrever]

I just got Gutsy Gibbon working on my laptop; however, the installation I used comes with Firefox and for some reason it tells me that I do not have permission to add any files to the plugins folder at /usr/lib/firefox/plugins.

It says that I do not have the correct permission. How do I correct this? Is the default user that is created not the root user that has all the permissions?

esrever@esrever-laptop:/usr$ chmod a+x bin
chmod: changing permissions of `bin': Operation not permitted
esrever@esrever-laptop:/usr$ cd /
esrever@esrever-laptop:/$ ls -l usr
total 120
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 36864 2008-01-17 11:57 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-10-15 19:21 games
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 2007-10-15 19:23 include
drwxr-xr-x 147 root root 40960 2008-01-17 12:00 lib
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 2007-10-15 19:17 local
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 2008-01-17 06:16 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 277 root root 12288 2008-01-17 11:57 share
drwxrwsr-x 4 root src 4096 2007-10-15 19:22 src
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2007-10-15 19:19 X11R6
esrever@esrever-laptop:/$ chmod a+x usr
chmod: changing permissions of `usr': Operation not permitted

[daark.child]

The right way to access directories that are owned by root on Ubuntu based distros is by using sudo e.g.

$sudo cp somefile /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/.

As it is, you are trying to change permissions for the wrong directory and I would advise you not to tinker with /usr/bin because you can hose your system if you make any errors.

[esrever]

Tried that: It did not work, still permission issues. Any other suggestions?

esrever@esrever-laptop:~/Programs/jre1.6.0_03/plugin/i386/ns7$ $sudo cp libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/
cp: cannot create regular file `/usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so': Permission denied

[daark.child]

Are you the admin of this system? If not are you in the admin group?

[esrever]

I'm the one that installed the OS, and "esrever" is the only account I created. All permissions are default, as in i haven't really changed anything permission wise since installing.

Is there anything else I can try? Permissions adjustments, another account i don't know about that is automatically created?

[daark.child]

I think I've noticed your problem. When you executed the commands I posted above, you included the $ sign. This is just there to indicate a normal users prompt (# for root) and should not be included in the final command. As well with the java plugin, you may have to create a symlink instead of copying e.g.

$ln -s /home/esrever/Programs/jre1.6.0_03/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

[esrever]

esrever@esrever-laptop:~$ ln -s /home/esrever/Programs/jre1.6.0_03/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/
ln: creating symbolic link `/usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so' to `/home/esrever/Programs/jre1.6.0_03/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so': Permission denied

I appreciate the help, but this STILL hasn't worked. Is there any way besides chmod to adjust permissions?

Basically, what I'm trying to do here is get Java installed into Firefox so I can get the Sun Download Manager to get the JDK to run eclipse properly. Is this the proper way to do that, or should I be going about it a different way?

I'd like to have the java plugin within firefox anyway, even if it's not necessary for this specific task.

[daark.child]

Can you run other administrative commands using sudo or do you get permission errors? You can try this by doing something like "sudo apt-get update".

[esrever]

This seems to have worked fine:

esrever@esrever-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get update
[sudo] password for esrever:
Ign cdrom://Ubuntu 7.10 _Gutsy Gibbon_ - Release i386 (20071017) gutsy/main Translation-en_US
Ign cdrom://Ubuntu 7.10 _Gutsy Gibbon_ - Release i386 (20071017) gutsy/restricted Translation-en_US
Get:1 Index of / gutsy Release.gpg [191B]
Ign Index of / gutsy/universe Translation-en_US
Ign Index of / gutsy/main Translation-en_US
Ign Index of / gutsy/restricted Translation-en_US
Ign Index of / gutsy/multiverse Translation-en_US
Hit Index of / gutsy Release
Hit Index of / gutsy/universe Packages
Hit Index of / gutsy/main Packages
Hit Index of / gutsy/restricted Packages
Hit Index of / gutsy/multiverse Packages
Fetched 1B in 0s (1B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
esrever@esrever-laptop:~$

[daark.child]

One thing you could try is install java in a global directory instead of your home directory e.g. in /opt and then try again to create the symlink.