Problems with permissions etc

[Frank Millman]

Thanks for all the replies. They were useful.

I think that my situation was best summed up by Mike - I need to figure
out which things I have to do as root and which I have to do as me. I
guess this only comes from experience, but it seems a good rule to
follow.

My reasons for wanting the mac address are nothing to do with security.
I have in mind a retail point-of-sale situation, where I want to record
which transactions took place at which point-of-sale. I hope that, in
this context, my use of the mac address will be safe enough.

As for wxPython, it is correctly installed in
/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages. However, as part of the build
process, wxPython builds its own version of gtk. It does not install
it, but stores the generated files in the original build directory, and
then hard-codes the path to the shared object files. As the original
build directory happened to be under another user's home directory, my
user could not read the files. I have deleted wxPython and reinstalled
it from another directory which all users can read, and it now works
fine. It was this 'other' directory that I was referring to when I
asked if there was a 'correct' place, but I guess that anywhere
reasonable is fine.

Many thanks to all

Frank