Well, it didn’t take long to answer the most important Roomba question. While unboxing, our 7 year-old noticed the buttons labeled “Max” and “Power”, and decided that Roomba should be named Max Power.Susan wants to name it Fred, however.
We’ll see who prevails.
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Windows Live Messenger, your error message is soooo helpful! Thanks! This really helps me solve my problem!
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Last summer I blogged about my problems accomplishing even simple configuration tasks in the Ubuntu Linux distro. (Here are links to the first post and the second post.)
I noticed that someone in the open source community quite helpfully posted an explanation of how I could solve one of my Linux problems. I appreciate that quite a lot. However, the solution itself just reinforces my point that Linux is not as usable as it needs to be for the mainstream computing herd.
Here’s the excerpted solution:
When you logged in as root in the command window, you made it so that command window was running a session using the root login. However, the rest of your system was logged in using your normal user name, which does not have “root” privileges. So, if you open a text editor using the menuing system, then that instance of the editor is running using your normal login, not root. Hence, the editor will not be able to store a file the GRUB “menu.lst” file (I think this is what you’re trying to edit, right?).
What you need to do is invoke the editor from within the command window where you are logged in as root. If your editor is gedit, you can do this by typing the following at the comand line:
gedit &
Before you actually change “menu.lst” I recommend making a backup copy of the current version by going to the correct directory within your command window where you’re logged in as root and entering something like:
cp menu.lst menu.lst_ok
You probably knew the command, but the point is it has to be done within the command window where you’ve changed your user to root.
Ubuntu also provides an alternative approach for opening an editor with “root”/superuser privileges:
1. open a command/terminal window
2. execute: sudo gedit
3. enter your passwordThis runs a session of the gedit editor as user “root”.
Again, great help from the community. But the solution is tragi-comically (comi-tragically?) complex. Remember, I was just trying to change the boot order! I shouldn’t have to possess all that conceptual background knowledge.
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