Fred, On Sat, 7 May 2005, F J Brooks wrote:
> I don�t know if this is the reason but (as I said in my posting of Wed 4 > May), I tried the two �installation� commands both as user ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) > and root ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). This was in desperation as I wasn't getting > anywhere as 'user' and assumed that I had to go into 'root' mode in order to > install files. Have I irretrievably screwed things up? If so, should I start > again by uninstalling/reinstalling Kubuntu? Please don't take this the wrong way, but it seems that you're looking more for a background on linux shell usage than making a speedtouch modem work - this list might begin to run out of patience pretty soon, I'm afraid. However, here are some suggestions. No, you haven't screwed everything up. All you've done is copied the files from the floppy into / (the root of your filesystem) rather than /home/fred, your user's home directory. "cp -r foo . " means "copy recursively foo to the current directory" - so you must have been in / when you ran that command. Lesson 1: be sure of your current directory before doing that sort of thing. In your case, your shell prompt tells you your current directory. I understand that, with ubuntu (I've never used it myself) the idea is that you never actually become root - on the occasions that you need to do something with root privileges (this includes installing new software, for exaple with "alien"), you just prefix the command with sudo. One of the advantages of the root/user separation is that it tries to stop uou making messy mistakes, so lesson 2: don't run a command as root unless you understand *why* it didn't work as a normal user. >From here, I suggest you proceed as follows. First tidy up your / directory. You probably will need to use sudo to change /. Looking at your earlier post: >> [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/$ ls >> bin dev initrd.img mnt sbin usr >> boot etc lib nano.save srv var >> br2684~1.deb firmwa~1 libatm~1.deb opt sys vmlinuz >> cdrom firmwa~2 lost+found outfile.pnm thelin~1.htm zzzl_3.012 >> chap-secrets home m-d proc thelin~2 >> chmod initrd media root tmp you need to: sudo rm br2684~1.deb firmwa~1 libatm~1.deb firwa~2 outfile.pnm thelin~1.htm zzzl_3.012 chap-secrets m-d thelin~2 chmod nano.save There are probably a couple of others, but those certainly don't look like they belong there. Now, the next problem is that the filenames on the floppy disk have been mangled. This is a combination of the fact that microsoft had to use some fearful bodges to make long filenames work with their filing system, and that you haven't told linux that it's a disc with long filenames. Try remounting it. sudo umount /media/floppy sudo mount -t vfat /dev/floppy /media/floppy Check that the contents of the floppy disc are now correctly visible: ls /media/floppy. If not (the full name of firmware-extractor is firmware-extractor, not firmwa~1), stop, and put it right before proceeding. Lesson 3: if step 1 doesn't work, don't blindly stumble on to steps 2 to 10 in the hope it will come out in the wash. You should have seen an error message from the chmod command when you ran it, and at this point you should have stopped to investigate. Once you get the floppy disk working correctly, you are ready to change to your home directory (/home/fred) - or better yet, make a temporary directory and change into that - and continue from the command "cp -r /media/floppy/* . && chmod +x firmware-extractor". Note that you do *not* need to be root to run that command. In fact, as I said earlier, you don't need to be root to run any of the commands on that page. The ones which require root privilege (in red) are already prefixed with sudo for you. Finally, a quick netiquette point: please don't top post, and please trim parts of previous posts you aren't replying to. Good luck! Richard Liste de diffusion modem ALCATEL SpeedTouch USB Pour se d�sinscrire : mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
