Mariana Eneva wrote:
Hi all,
I just got on the newbie list. I have three questions that I hope someone
can answer:
(1) I need to grant a remote access to someone, so that he can install
and set up certain software on my Linux laptop. I have Ubuntu Linux. I know
this is not generally advisable, but it has to be done in this case, because
he is not in San Diego and there are too m any setups fro me to be able to
do myself. How can I set up my laptop so that he can get access?
You will need to do a couple of things. If you have a home
router/firewall you could do port forwarding to the laptop. The port you
want to forward is port 22 and send it to the IP address of the laptop.
But that might be a bit much without a whole lot of background
instruction. In that case the first step is to get your laptop connected
directly to the Internet through your cable or DSL provider without
going through the router/firewall. First power off the cable or DSL
modem and the laptop. Hook the laptop directly to the cable/DSL modem.
Turn on the cable/DSL modem. Then turn on the laptop. If things are
working correctly, you should be able to browse the Web.
The next step is to create another user. Use the system tools to create
a new user with the name of person you are working with. Create a
difficult password.
When that is done, call the other person and tell them the following:
1) your IP address. You can find this out by opening a terminal and
typing /sbin/ifconfig
2) the user name and password you created for that person.
That will allow your fellow worker to log in to your laptop with ssh.
WARNING: Setting up your machine for direct internet access can be
dangerous!
(2) In (1) above, I am worried that some of their scripts will not work,
because of the need for "sudo" to precede some commands. For example, I need
sudo even with "mkdir", etc. Also, each directory I create needs then "sudo
chmod 777 .", as otherwise I cannot copy files to it. There must be some way
to set up this so, that sudo and chmod are not needed. Does anyone know how
to do it?
sudo is a program for executing programs with super-user (root)
privileges. If your fellow worker says they need to use sudo, then that
means that want to do something as root. I would deeply question why
anything they want to install requires sudo, unless it is a normal part
of Ubuntu or a built package. Any other software should be able to be
installed as a regular user. If you really need to allow sudo, go to the
system administration, open the groups and add the new user to the admin
group. That will give them the ability to use sudo.
chmod means to change the mode, i.e read, write and execute for a file
or directory. In the case of a directory, execute means the ability to
traverse the directory. Using chmod is a vital part of software control
on a Linux system, so you can't do without it.
(3) I went to the Installfest yesterday - I already had Ubuntu, but I
needed help with repartitioning that Gus graciously provided. In the
process, he discovered that I was running the old kernel 2.6.15-51-386 and
helped me get 2.6.15-51-686. However, if I now start with 686 I get
scrambled text and weird colors. So, I reverted to starting with 386. This
worked as before, but when I left the screen for a while, I returned to find
the same scrambled text as with 686. This is the first time I am getting
this problem and I do not know what it means. Can anyone help me to fix
that?
Are you using the restricted drivers for the video? If so, you need to
get the version that matches your kernel. This can be tricky because you
boot into to graphical mode, so you can't get there from here without
taking a detour. The real fix is to force the system to boot into text
mode, install the appropriate driver, edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file
if necessary, and then reboot back into graphical mode.
For the time being just use the old kernel. The only difference is a
slight performance loss with the i386 kernel compared to the i686
kernel. Ubuntu made a mistake when it installed the i386 kernel. Turn
off the screen saver to avoid the scrambled screen. I'm not sure why
this was affected by installing the new kernel, unless Ubuntu is somehow
broken. I would need to see the system to figure out what the problem is.
Gus
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