Newbie Linux questions

[fyleow]

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[drag]

Originally posted by: fyleow
Quick questions for the Linux gurus here.

1) Is there a way to run Nautilus with elevated privileges temporarily? Right now I need to run terminal and sudo if I need to move/rename/delete files that my local account doesn't have permissions to.

Don't think so.

Mostly it's this for text editing I support, suppose. Gnome has good drag and drop support so you can open sudo gedit or sudo gvim or whatever and then drag the file from nautilus to the editor.

2) How do I change the default programs used to open file types? I'd like to make mplayer open automatically when I double click a media file instead of totem.

Right click the file, go to properties, hit the open-with tab, select mplayer. It will change it for all files of that type.

Otherwise you can go into ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list and edit that file if you want to do this stuff directly. There are *.desktop files that describe what application you want to use and how to launch them. Occasionally you can point Gnome to use a paticular program, but it doesn't realy work. Usually if it fails it will launch the application, but not have the application open the file. You can fix this by editing the applications *.desktop file.

Also through nautilus you can add your own applications and it will make a new .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/

3) Some programs like mplayer (at least with the default install options) don't like playing files that are on the network. The solution is to mount the samba share. Is there a way to get around this issue without mounting?

Thanks.

I donno. What do you mean by 'files that are on the network'? You are trying to stream media files or something?

 

[fyleow]

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[Nothinman]

Alright well it's no big deal I guess. It's just annoying that the directories on my file servers are owned by root for some odd reason. I'll just chown it back to my local user.

You can probably run 'gksu nautilus', I'm not sure if there's an icon for that setup by default. But in general it's a much better idea to just make sure that the files have the correct ownership.

Yeah when streaming files over the network mplayer will give an error saying that it couldn't be found. This happens if I just double click on a media file while it's on the network. If I mount it first then it's no problem. It works with totem though, and Kaffeine in Kubuntu.

Network paths aren't standardised like they are on Windows with UNC paths, most Gnome apps understand smb://blah (or ssh:// or whatever else the gnome vfs supports) paths but normal unix utilities don't and I guess that mplayer is one that doesn't.

 

[firefly2442]

Originally posted by: fyleow
Quick questions for the Linux gurus here.

1) Is there a way to run Nautilus with elevated privileges temporarily? Right now I need to run terminal and sudo if I need to move/rename/delete files that my local account doesn't have permissions to.

sudo nautilus

from the terminal? That's what I do sometimes.

 

[Alone]

Originally posted by: firefly2442

Originally posted by: fyleow
Quick questions for the Linux gurus here.

1) Is there a way to run Nautilus with elevated privileges temporarily? Right now I need to run terminal and sudo if I need to move/rename/delete files that my local account doesn't have permissions to.

sudo nautilus

from the terminal? That's what I do sometimes.

It's good practice to use gksu/gksudo (graphical sudo) for GUI based commands (nautilus, gedit) as mentioned above.