Re: [LUG] lshw -html UPDATED

[Gordon Henderson <gordon+dcglug@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 9 Feb 2010, tom wrote:

> Gordon Henderson wrote:
> > On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, tom wrote:
> >
> > > tom wrote:
> > > > I've just run sudo lshw -html    on a machine and a couple of thing 
> > > > popped up in red - one of which was the graphics chip which mostly works 
> > > > all right but one or two thing produce windows with graph paper or black
> > > > Anyone know how to dig deeper into this?
> > > > Tom te tom te tom
> > > I'm not 100% sure but I think the red may be due to problems with the 
> > > display driver.
> > > I found out how to fix it (in theory) but I've now come across a problem 
> > > where I cant save Xorg.conf even as sudo!
> > > I dont want to change the ownership without setting it back to whatever it 
> > > was before - does anyone know a little script that will save the file 
> > > settings somewhere and then change them so sudo can edit and save the file 
> > > and then write them back again?
> >
> > If you
> >
> >   ls -l
> >
> > the original file, you'll get all the information you need to change 
> > ownership & modes after writing a new file.
> >
> > Xorg.conf is fairly minimal these days though - it's unusual to need to 
> > fiddle with it - at least in the Debian world... I did do some fiddling on 
> > the laptop to get compiz going though.
> >
> > Gordon
> Its a 32 meg radeon - there is a known problem with it and the fix is to 
> modify Xorg.conf to add
> Option "RenderAccel" "off"
>
> even under sudo editors wont overwrite the original file and its easy to make 
> a mistake with resetting ownership/permissions so I though someone may know 
> of a script to record its status and then reset it after modification.
> I guess I'll have to write one!

Just ls -l the file, so:

  ls -l /etc/X11/xorg.conf

On mine, I see:

  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3433 Dec  1  2008 /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I have to say though - there is normally nothing special about the 
ownership and permissions of the various system files. In-general, they're 
read only by normal users, and read/write by root. That's all. The 
numberic modes for the file above is 0644.

But if you really can't write it, show the output of

  lsattr /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I get:

  ------------------- /etc/X11/xorg.conf

If you see a lower-case 'i' in the line of dashes, then it's write 
protected, even to root.

If you really can't modify the file, then stop mucking about with sudo and 
do a real su;

  su -

then you're really root and anything sudo might do won't get in the way. 
If you don't have su, then sudo /bin/bash will work. (FWIW, I don't even 
have sudu installed on any of my boxes, but that's just me, and Debian - 
if I have to type 4 commands as root, I'm not prefixing them with sudu!)

Gordon

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