how to copy file to /etc/bootsplash?

[@trapine]

just downloaded a file to change my boot splash in suse 10.1 need to copy the tar.gz to /etc/bootsplash but when i try it throws up, You do not have write permission? Was Wondering how i would go about getting write access? any help would be much appreciated Thanks @trapine!

[sdousley]

You will need to do this as root.. there's a couple of ways...

su -

then enter root's password*

or:

sudo cp /path/to/file /etc/bootsplash

and again when prompted for password, put in root's password*.
[*]Both of these are true afaik, except on Ubuntu, where you will need to put your password iirc

[@trapine]

worked perfect using the terminal thanks sdousley. Much appreciated.
Regards @trapine!

[sdousley]

worked perfect using the terminal thanks sdousley. Much appreciated.
Regards @trapine!

you're welcome.

I'll give you a quick overview of permissions to help clear up why this worked.

Take the output of the command: "ls -al" for example, i did this in the home directory on my server and some of the output is below:

drwxr-xr-x 7 sdousley users 4096 Jul 9 2006 .test_supy
-rw------- 1 sdousley users 460 Jan 24 17:04 Mailbox
-rw-r--r-- 1 sdousley users 516 Jan 17 10:28 dead.letter
-rw-r--r-- 1 sdousley users 196 Aug 2 2006 dvd's for paul.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 sdousley users 12 Feb 1 11:18 foo -> homepage.sql

The permisssions is the FIRST thing on each line of output. This being all the r's, w's and x's.

EVERY file, folder, symlink has permissions on it in 3 levels. There's the Owner permissions, Group permissions and then world permissions. Each split into read, write and execute levels.

In the above example, take for instance the "dead.letter" file.

The permissions on this file are: "-rw-r--r--" this means nothing, so here' the explanation. Ignore the first character for now be that the "l", "d" or "-" so we have: "rw-r--r--"

Now split that into 3 sets of 3 characters: "rw-/r--/r--" (the "/" is the seperator.

OK, so the first set of permissions is the Owner's permission rights, this file has read/write permissions, so they cannot execute the file.

Secondly is the group permissions, they can only read the file, and thirdly the world (any other user on the system not in the group or the owner) we can see they have read permissions also. So basically the ONLY person that can edit this file is the owner (and root since root has write permission on everything).

Onto finding who the owner user and group are. After the permissions is a single digit, ignore this. We then see the owner, in this case "sdousley" followed by the group "users". Therefore the user sdousley (me) has read/write permissions to dead.letter and any other user can simply read the file.

As for the /etc directory (where you were trying to put something) most of the folders in there, including bootsplash will have permissions such as rwxr-xr-x and owned by root:root the : being the seperator between user and group.

Hope this helps to explain quite why you had to do this as root.

The other solution would have been to allow all users to edit the files in /etc, however this is NOT a good idea since this allows people to edit config files and mess up the system completely!!

[@trapine]

Cheerz again sdousley. the more i learn about the terminal way of things the more i like computers again.