Thursday, June 14, 2012
WARNING: TECHNICAL INFORMATION AHEAD
Great news today! Just two days after placing the order for the firewire cable I needed, it arrived (I’m going to give the seller an amazing review). When I got back to where I’m staying, I connected the macbook (which if you remember has a dead screen) to my Ubuntu laptop via the firewire and a firewire adapter. Pressing “T” on the mac, I turned it on. The screen was dead, so I didn’t know if it was working until I turned on the other laptop. Once it booted, there on my desktop, was a mounted drive with the name of my mac, in this case- El Director.
Next I opened the drive and sure enough, there was the macbook’s directory. I navigated to my home folder and almost cried- all the folders there were X’d out, meaning that I didn’t have permission to open them, much less extract data. I took a few seconds to pray for guidance and an idea entered my thoughts. I vaguely remembered that linux has another file browser called Nautilus and that it could circumvent permissions. So I fired up the Terminal.
Once the black window with a flashing cursor popped up, I punched in sudo nautilus and hit enter. For those that don’t know, Terminal allows you to enter commands to get the computer to respond. Just typing the name of a program in the Terminal will open it. Attaching “sudo” to the beginning will open the program with “root” or super admin privileges (in this case, allowing Nautilus to bypass permissions). It prompted me for my password and after I entered it, Nautilus file explorer opened up.
This time when I navigated to my “Leap 3” folder, the X’s were gone and I was able to get access. Next I tried to copy the celtx file for my script to the desktop. An error popped up saying I didn’t have permission. So instead I opened the script in Celtx and was able to save to the cloud and “Save As” a copy to my Ubuntu machine =D
So now I’m able to “copy” any of my files by opening and re-saving, but this will be a tedious process. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll get online and see if there’s a way to fix the permissions so I can just copy stuff. I’d like to copy the entire Films folder that I have. It contains 13 folders for my past and future feature films. Data includes synopsis, reference pics, research for the subject matter, all that good stuff which would be nice to have. But I can’t complain right now, because God is good and allowed me to recover the script, saving me from rewriting 20 pages (and a lot happens in those 20 pages).
With that, good night everybody!
