Re: Linux help please?

[Federico Bruni]

Il giorno dom, 13/03/2011 alle 14.43 +0000, Phil Holmes ha scritto:
> Nothing to do with LilyPond, but don't know where else to ask.
> 
> I've been creating an Ubuntu VM to install an open-source telephone 
> exchange, Asterix.  All going well until I had to compile a package called 
> Dahdi.  This failed on an include, and so I was trying to edit the source 
> file.  It's owned by root and so logged in as phil, it was read-only.  I 
> thought that rather than learn the syntax of chmod, I'd just briefly log in 
> as root.  I clicked the "log-off" button and switched user to root.  All the 
> desktop furniture disappeared - no task bar, no Places, no logout, nothing. 
> So I shut down using the VM command and restarted.  Same.  I'm shown as 
> logged in as phil, but I can't do anything at all.  Anyone any ideas of how 
> to get my desktop back?
> 

I guess that you are just seeing a terminal.
So log as phil and then launch this command:

startx

You should see again your desktop.

You don't have to change the owner or the permissions of an installation
file.
Open it using sudo:

sudo nano file

or

sudo gedit file

HTH,
Federico