Ranthologia: Rants on Tech, the Net and Web Development

I don’t know if this is a known bug in Kubuntu’s Konqueror file explorer,(KDE’s equivalent of Windows Explorer and Gnome’s Nautilus) but I recently encountered a minor glitch which, I believe, can be exploited if not addressed by those hardcore linux developers out there.

I was going to copy some files from my backup cd’s (which I burned months ago) on my Feisty workstation by dragging and dropping them from one open window to another. One of my backup cds did it ok, but my other ones kept having some error coming out, “Can’t read file”. I was thinking maybe the cd got corrupted but it couldn’t have been, because they work perfectly fine in my Windows installation. Then it hit me: it was as basic as file permissions.

It only made sense that Linux will not let you copy files from a non-rewritable medium (such as CDs) unless you had root privileges. Konqueror by default runs under the same user privs as the logged on user. My only complaint was that to some unexperienced newbie, this might seem like the CD itself could be corrupted. Except maybe for the “Can’t read file”-like popup that appears when you try the copy the files, there’s no appropriate error message that shows up that even suggests a solution. The error message could have been something like:

Can’t copy files from [medium]. Please try copying the the files as root user (sudo cp [options] [files])

That could have given unfamiliar users an idea on what to do next. I tried copying the files and directories using the command line (through sudo), like so:

$ cd /media/cdrom
$ sudo cp -R my_directory/*

I was able to copy the files after entering those commands, but there was still the problem of the copied files with the preserved read-only permissions and root ownership, which I easily resolved by doing a chown on all the files to change ownership from root to my username.