John Mundinger wrote:
I have an older laptop computer and decided that I would like to
become familiar with working in the Linux operation environment.
Welcome aboard :-)
So, I downloaded an image file for the minimal installation [i386]
and, after burning that image to a CD, I used the CD to complete the
internet installation. Apparently the installation was successful and
I now have a dual boot computer with Windows XP SP3 operating in one
partition and Linux/GRUB in the other.
Now, my question. I would like to change the boot sequence and change
to a 30 second delay on startup. I found information about how to do
that by editing file system/boot/grub/menu.lst. However, that file is
read only. I am not able to revise permissions and, therefore, am
unable to edit/save that file.
<snip>
Do you have any suggestions about how I might be able to change the
permissions so that I am able to modify some of the configuration
settings?
Have you installed and set up sudo by any chance? If not, then I'd
suggest that you do so. This might well be a simple case of, once
you've installed sudo and configured it [1], entering something like
sudo joe[2] /etc/<the path-to-the-file to be edited>
Good luck
AG
[1] I think that sudo is installed by default, so what you would need to
do then is enter into a text-based terminal su (which will allow you to
login as root) and then visudo . This will open up a file for you to
edit. This is very straightforward - simply go to the line following
the one reading root ALL=(ALL), etc. and add your username and then the
same text with the same spacing, etc as the line above it. Once you've
entered this, save and exit. Then, whenever you want to edit your file,
enter the line given above - i.e. sudo ...
[2] "Joe" is just one of a number of editors. There have been flame
wars over this stuff, so just go with a text editor that you can use
when your X server is not running, just in case you need to fix
something that has borked - this would include: joe, vi (or vim), emacs,
nano, pico, and a number of others
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