Need rights to change usr/share

Asked by Dave Allen

  As the owner and sole user of a machine running Ubuntu 10.04, I have installed 'scrivener'' This wants to write to usr/share but does not have 'administrative rights' to do so. Since its my machine, I ought to have such rights to do anything with it. How do I get them?

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mycae (mycae) said :
#1

Hmm, if it is installed, it shouldn't need this - this indicates poor design in the application, or that it is attempting to do something malicious. You should report a bug, and cross check that you actually have the right file, and have not downloaded some malware.

You can give it administrator rights by using the "sudo" command, before the command itself, eg "sudo scrivener" (if installed in your PATH).

Note that by doing this, you are giving the application full access to your system - this is discouraged.

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Dave Allen (davidallen131) said :
#2

  Thanks for the attention. The problem is this arises within the operation of a loaded program -Scrivener for Linux, so I don't have access to the command. The associated error message tells me to 'contact the administrator to obtain permission'. But I am the administrator: how do I give myself this permission?

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mycae (mycae) said :
#3

Under unix systems (incl. mac osx, for example), users always run programs at reduced privilege. This is a core security component of the os. If a program is compromised, or just doing something stupid, it will not be able to affect other users' accounts, or your system as a whole.

Whilst you may have the option to elevate your privilege to administrator rights, you need a password to do so.

The command that you need to type is the "sudo" command (probably, "sudo scrivener"), but it depends on the name and install path of the scrivener executable, which I don't know..

You can enter it using the launcher (alt+f2), or in a terminal (ctrl+alt+t). Doing so will run the process in administrator ( aka root) mode.

>The associated error message tells me to 'contact the administrator to obtain permission'
That's just an application giving an unhelpful error message.

I cannot give more specific instructions, as the program is not open source, so I cannot look at the code that is causing the error, or try to replicate the problem on my system (Hence why I don't know the name of the binary).

You would probably be best asking the scrivener developers what they are doing, why, and how to fix it, as they *can* see the code that scrivener is built from.

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mycae (mycae) said :
#4

Sorry, the key point about the password i missed above. Applications must be authorised by entering the password, which is only known to the human (one hopes) -- they cannot escalate themselves.

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Sam_ (and-sam) said :
#5
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Sam_ (and-sam) said :
#6
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Sam_ (and-sam) said :
#7

Full circle magazine just published a special edition about scribus.
http://fullcirclemagazine.org/scribus-special-edition/

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Dave Allen (davidallen131) said :
#8

  Sudo Scrivener in the terminal gets it started -- and introduces a whole load of problems specific to the program. Thanks for the support (but not to Sam - I want to try Scrivener. Should LandL claim a violation of advertising rights?).