[SOLVED] bootloader installer (on Linux) can't find 4G grayscale

[punchcutter]

I've searched around the forums but can't quite find an answer to my problem.  Here it is in a nutshell:

I've got a 4thGen (click-wheel) grayscale (20gig).
My host OS is openSUSE Linux 10.1

I've got the 'pod mounted as a hard disk - I'm assuming this is all that is needed to satisfy requirements of "disk mode".  Mount point is /mnt/ipod (have tried other paths as well)

Rockbox OS software and fonts already loaded by hand - now trying to install the bootloader.

KEY POINT(?): the 'pod is mounted as my user, not as root, because I would rather not be doing this stuff as root.  Not that I don't trust the Rockbox folks, but it's better not to trust if you don't have to.  Nothing personal   My user has full read/write permission on the 'pod.

Whether I run ipodpatcher from shell command line, or rbutilqt GUI program (as my user of course, not root), I get same result:

No ipods found (or words to that effect).  Software simply doesn't see the 'pod.  This is even in spite of configuring rbutilqt with my exact device type and mount point.

Is this all because I'm not running as root?  I hope not...  since this installation really has nothing to do with the host machine, I can't see why there should be an absolute requirement to be running code as superuser.

Thanks for the help,
Dave

[linuxstb]

ipodpatcher and rbutil need read/write access to the raw disk device assigned to your ipod (e.g. /dev/sda).  The mount point is irrelevant (it doesn't even need to be mounted).

In my Debian install, usb disks are in the "floppy" group, and I've added my user to that group - so I don't need to be root to run ipodpatcher.

[punchcutter]

Thanks for the lightning fast response! That was the info I needed to solve the problem.

To summarize for posterity: I needed to add myself to the group "disk", which on my system is the group owning the /dev/sda raw device, and then do a chmod g+w /dev/sda.  I was then able to install the bootloader.  Of course after the install I restored the old permissions to /dev/sda, and removed myself from the group. And of course the changing of groups and permissions had to be done as root.

Now I'm happily playing around with RockBox and looking forward to seeing how much cooler it is than the Apple OS... don't know what took me so long to discover it....

Dave