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View Full Version : HELP; NEWB HERE! What do these intstructions mean?



donald_willy
06-02-2004, 04:27 AM
I'm a newb, and am going to sound like an idiot but I have downloaded a program, and the instructions to install that were included in it confuse the heck out of me. I know how to open konsole and act as root, but beyond that, I'm close to useless. I've often seen on here many step by step guides including prompt commands given to newbs; something like that would be fantastic! I would really apreciate anybodies help! Here are the instructions I recieved.

Before running
==============
NOTE: nomad manager will need read/write access to /dev/parport0 (LPT1,
curently hardcoded). To allow access
a) be root (not good idea)
b) give the user you working from access to /dev/parport0. You can do this
in two ways:
1) (better) Check what group does /dev/parport0 belongs to. Add your user to that group.
Example: I run under user 'valters'. /dev/parport0 ownership belong to group 'lp'.
Switch to root, edit /etc/group file, on line lp:[someting] add ',valters' to end of line.
(As in: line in question in my /etc/groups it looks like this: 'lp:x:7:daemon,lp,valters' ).
You must be root to edit /etc/group file.

2) (not good idea) Simply change /dev/parport0 permissions to be world readable/writable.
(As in: 'chmod a+rw /dev/parport0'). You must be root to change /dev/parport0 permissions.

Run
===

run './freenomad'.

NOTE: nomad manager will create debug log file in /tmp/nomad-debug.log.
This logfile will contain detailed debug output and hex dumps of player
commands/responses. Inspect the file to see what is not working...
Don't forget to delete /tmp/nomad-debug.log occasionally, it grows big fast.

user unknown
06-02-2004, 04:50 AM
It's a printer-topic.
The printer normally is a pseudouser too, normally with name 'lp' like LinePrinter.

To validate that information, issue the command:

ls /dev/lp*
which leads to output like this:

crw-rw---- 1 root lp 6, 0 2004-03-14 04:32 /dev/lp0
crw-rw---- 1 root lp 6, 1 2004-03-14 04:32 /dev/lp1
crw-rw---- 1 root lp 6, 2 2004-03-14 04:32 /dev/lp2

it means:
c= character device (there are b=block-devices too, d=directory, ...)
rw- means: owner has read-write - permissions, but not executable.
rw- dito for the group
--- rest of the world
we see owner is 'root' and the group is 'lp'.

That's enough.
Every file belongs to an owner and a group, and if you're in this group, you have group-access.
And the printer-devices are represented as a kind of file.

Now, I assume there is one user on your system, called 'donald'.
Instead of manipulating the group-file by hand, you simply issue this command:

usermod -G lp donald and donald belongs to the group 'lp' too.
Don't type:

usermod -g lp donald, because this would make donald's initial group to 'lp'.
Every user may belong to several groups, but has an initial-group, in your case 'users'.
If you create a file, it will be created with this group account. And you don't want to make your files with group-permission 'lp' - that would be nonsense.