Permission to burn a DVD?

[roshi]

no ACL error. It said everything was peachy keen.

What is going on, for example, is that

- burning a DVD, just now, after "repairing" permissions, it would not let me move some items to the burn box, because not sufficient privileges. I had to click on the DVD, enter an admin password, and manually toggle the permissions.

- in my Downloads folder, I just created a folder and put five files in it - the TAKE CONTROL series from Tidbits. Then I created another file, a Pages document, and tried to put it in there as well. The OS claimed I didn't have permission to do that. But hmm, moving the folder out of downloads onto the desktop solved that.

[roshi]

TEDIOUS.

that is, transfering user stuff bit by bit.

Installing Leopard was EASY. Quick. Getting basic functionality - adding printers, installing Pages, totally easy and quick.

But going through and manually looking for preference files and adding them - hours go by.

[MacMagus]

Permissions are SERIOUSLY f-ed up under Leopard with access controls. It seems to have randomly placed access restrictions across files and folders on my drive. Some, like the "do not delete" flag on the home folder make sense. At least one other caused some trouble.

I recently had to trash the DVD Player folder from my ~/Library/Application Support folder because the contents were locked away from modification.

The DVD Player was giving me an error about writing to its pref's upon exit and when I made clones of my drive, I was getting insufficient permissions errors for that folder.

Of course, according to the Get Info window, I was owner with read and write access to the folder and everything in it.

Yet, I couldn't do a sudo chmod or sudo rm to get rid of the files. They gave me the same insufficient permissions error. (Yes, even insufficient permissions when I tried deleting it as ROOT!) Oddly, trashing the parent folder from the GUI worked. The DVD Player subsequently ran just fine and the new DVD Player folder has the correct permissions.

I've been reading up on access controls and I think that instead of trashing it, I could have used "sudo chmod -a# 0 " or "chmod -R -N" to get rid of the access controls on the folder and each of the files within. I'm now waiting to find the next permissions problem to try that on.


Edit: TinkerTool System also removes access controls. I haven't tried it yet so I can't speak for its efficacy, but perhaps using it on your Downloads folder would solve some of your problems.
http://www.bresink.com/osx/193281/history.html

The access control on the Downloads folder is supposedly just to keep people from accidentally deleting the folder. If you are confident that you won't accidentally trash it, you might as well get rid of the access control.

[roshi]

MacMagus wrote,

"I've been reading up on access controls and I think that instead of trashing it, I could have used "sudo chmod -a# 0 " or "chmod -R -N" to get rid of the access controls on the folder and each of the files within. I'm now waiting to find the next permissions problem to try that on. "

THAT is what I mean. This whole thing reminds me of the first release of OS X years ago. Everyone was using a utility called BatchMod or something like that, to work around the permissions problems. It felt sort of primitive. Voodoo was in the air. Much swinging of chickens and bats.

I know there are weird utilities to jimmy the lock - I just don't want to use them and don't want to HAVE to.

I have about five redundant clones of my main working HD, which I am keeping away from the computer, and a couple of everyday clones as backup, and I'm poking along, exploring.