A friend of mine connected a USB external hard drive up to his ubuntu laptop. It had previously been used on a mac, and had some files on it. He can't access the files because the owner is the username used on the mac, different to the username on the ubuntu laptop, and the file permissions are set to let just the owner read them. At this point my non-expert friend was stuck and had to ask for help, having no idea why he couldn't access the files, and blaming ubuntu for it. He said "they have a little x next to them."
Now I know this problem is due to file permissions and may happen on mac or windows as well. But isn't this silly? He's in no way prevented from accessing the files. He can access them, or change their permissions, as root. He could even create a new user with the username used on the mac and access them that way. So I think the security value of this is nil and it serves only to annoy, because he has to fiddle with the file permissions as root before he can access them, and has to ask for help to do this. So I'm just wondering if something can or should be done to avoid this situation, and prevent the user from having to workaround it manually. I hesitate to suggest it, but if the user can't access some files, but is a sudo user, then really they can access them in a few clicks of they know what file permissions are, could we do something to the "You do not have permission to access those files" error message, like add a button to it that says "Change file permissions" and when clicked recursively changes the file permissions appropriately (asking for the sudo password first). -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
