Stephen Powell <zlinuxman> wrote: > (1) I believe that "aptitude install linux-source-x.x.xx", as with any > package installation, requires root privileges. Yes, but that isn't the only way to get the source. There are many ways of getting linux kernel source that don't involve installing packages. > (2) By default, "aptitude install linux-source-x.x.xx" installs the > .tar.bz2 file in /usr/src. My non-superuser self does not have > write permissions to that directory; so it cannot be uncompressed > in place. It has to be moved somewhere else, such as a directory off > of my home directory. And then I have to use chown and chgrp on it > to assign the ownership of the file to my non-superuser self. If it is your own machine then you should certainly be in the 'src' group and then you would have access to /usr/src as your own normal user self. And if you don't know about src then you probably don't know about 'staff' and 'adm' either. The staff group gets you access to /usr/local and adm gets you read-only browsing capability to /var/log/*. You probably want all three. $ sudo adduser zlinuxman adm $ sudo adduser zlinuxman src $ sudo adduser zlinuxman staff Then log out. At login you will be set to those additional groups. With those in place you can work as yourself in those areas. Safer than using root since as yourself you can't smash anything in the system directories /etc or /bin or /var or other system locations. This makes installing local software through 'make install' much safer and more contained when not done as root. If one were to crawl out of /usr/local for example you would see the failure. If you were running as root then you would not. Bob
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