Q I want to give myself, as user, permission to use my CD-ROM, CD writer, floppy and so on, and avoid the 'Permission Denied' error message when using programs such as CD Player. If I go into a terminal as su - or log in as root - and type chmod 666 /dev/hdc, all is then OK for the duration of the session. Unfortunately, when I reboot I lose the new settings, and am back with Permission Denied! What am I doing wrong? Is there any way of getting Linux (Fedora) to remember the settings? This seems such a basic problem and must affect many newbies, yet it never seems to be covered in articles or textbooks (which I have studied by the score).
A You can solve your permissions problems by adding your user to the cdrom group, by adding the username to the line starting 'cdrom' in /etc/group. Unix is traditionally rather restrictive about users accessing physical devices, so everything is split up into multiple groups in order for granular access to be provided. For other devices, check out the file in /dev and see which user and group it is set up as.