DISCOVERY Re: Why is Firefox such a beast??

[Tim]

On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 15:42 +0000, Beartooth wrote:
> Also, dragging one file (or many, or all) from the folder on the 
> CD to one on the hard drive would copy, not move -- i.e., not remove
> from the CD -- even though the same action would move (not copy) the
> file if I did it between most hard drive folders. (The ones in the
> backgrounds tab of what "gnome-appearance-properties %F" opens, I
> believe, are an exception in that they aren't removed from the
> donating folder.)

In general, dragging between folders on the same mount point, does a
move.  But dragging across different mount points (different partitions,
different drives, etc.), does a copy.  I've had mixed results in
dragging and dropping across to something over NFS.

> I don't know exactly what the padlock means; it seems to vary. 

In general, you cannot make changes to that file, but you may be able
read it, but sometimes you have no sort of access allowed to it (in
short, "not yours").  Someone else owns it, and you don't have the
appropriate permissions to modify it.

> In particular, Fedora will usually open a pic with a padlock -- 
> at least in the sense that it will display it; but it often won't open
> some other file at all.

Look at the permissions:  rw-rwr-r--  (that's three sequences of
readable, writeable, and executable, for owner's, group's, & others').

There's also SELinux, some files aren't allowed to be read by some
processes.  But that's more the sort of thing you encounter when trying
to webserve some file that shouldn't be served.

> Nor do I have any inkling why ownership should change. If I copy 
> something -- text, pic, or executable -- successfully to the clipboard
> (I guess Gnome has a clipboard.), and then paste it into a file that I
> create, don't I own that file? 

In general, yes.  Ownership oughtn't to change, unless you take a file
off your system.  e.g. You put it onto a removable disc, then later on
that disc is mounted and owned by someone else.  Or you're logged in
twice, as different users, moving files about between them.  Or you're
doing things over a network.  With NFS, for instance, the files are
owned by a user, using the user ID, it doesn't matter what the user
names are.  If you're user 500 on one box and 502 on another, you're a
different user going by the numbers.

> Is it even possible to set permissions in such a way that a user 
> can copy a file, but not own the copy?? That sounds like some M$
> trick ...

It's doable with Samba, at least.  It can be set so that files written
to one spot are owned by some particular user, no matter how they got
there.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.26.5-45.fc9.i686

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