Fedora, like all Linux based systems, comes with a powerful set of security features. One of the basic features is permissions on files and folders. These permissions allow files and folders to be secured from unauthorized access. This article explains a bit about these permissions, and shows you how to share access to a folder using them.

Permission basics

Fedora is by nature a multi-user operating system. It also has groups, which users can be members of. But imagine for a moment a multi-user system with no concept of permissions. Different logged in users could read each other’s content at will. This isn’t very good for privacy or security, as you can imagine.

Any file or folder on Fedora has three sets of permissions assigned. The first set is for the user who owns the file or folder. The second is for the group that owns it. The third set is for everyone else who’s not the user who owns the file, or in the group that owns the file. Sometimes this is called the world.

What permissions mean

Each set of permissions comes in three flavors — read, write, and execute. Each of these has an initial that stands for the permission, thus r, w, and x.

File permissions

For files, here’s what these permissions mean:

• Read ®: the file content can be read
• Write (w): the file content can be changed
• Execute (x): the file can be executed — this is used primarily for programs or scripts that are meant to be run directly

You can see the three sets of these permissions when you do a long listing of any file. Try this with the /etc/services file on your system:

$ ls -l /etc/services
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 692241 Apr 9 03:47 /etc/services

Notice the groups of permissions at the left side of the listing. These are provided in three sets, as mentioned above — for the user who owns the file, for the group that owns the file, and for everyone else. The user owner is root and the group owner is the root group. The user owner has read and write access to the file. Anyone in the group root can only read the file. And finally, anyone else can also only read the file. (The dash at the far left shows this is a regular file.)

By the way, you’ll commonly find this set of permissions on many (but not all) system configuration files. They are only meant to be changed by the system administrator, not regular users. Often regular users need to read the content as well.

Folder (directory) permissions

For folders, the permissions have slightly different meaning:

• Read ®: the folder contents can be read (such as the ls command)
• Write (w): the folder contents can be changed (files can be created or erased in this folder)
• Execute (x): the folder can be searched, although its contents cannot be read. (This may sound strange, but the explanation requires more complex details of file systems outside the scope of this article. So just roll with it for now.)

Take a look at the /etc/grub.d folder for example:

$ ls -ld /etc/grub.d
drwx------. 2 root root 4096 May 23 16:28 /etc/grub.d

Note the d at the far left. It shows this is a directory, or folder. The permissions show the user owner (root) can read, change, and cd into this folder. However, no one else can do so — whether they’re a member of the root group or not. Notice you can’t cd into the folder, either:

$ cd /etc/grub.d
bash: cd: /etc/grub.d: Permission denied

Notice how your own home directory is setup:

$ ls -ld $HOME
drwx------. 221 paul paul 28672 Jul 3 14:03 /home/paul

Now, notice how no one, other than you as the owner, can access anything in this folder. This is intentional! You wouldn’t want others to be able to read your private content on a shared system.

Making a shared folder

You can exploit this permissions capability to easily make a folder to share within a group. Imagine you have a group called finance with several members who need to share documents. Because these are user documents, it’s a good idea to store them within the /home folder hierarchy.

To get started, use sudo to make a folder for sharing, and set it to be owned by the finance group:

$ sudo mkdir -p /home/shared/finance
$ sudo chgrp finance /home/shared/finance

By default the new folder has these permissions. Notice how it can be read or searched by anyone, even if they can’t create or erase files in it:

drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Jul 6 15:35 finance

That doesn’t seem like a good idea for financial data. Next, use the chmod command to change the mode (permissions) of the shared folder. Note the use of g to change the owning group’s permissions, and o to change other users’ permissions. Similarly, u would change the user owner’s permissions:

$ sudo chmod g+w,o-rx /home/shared/finance

The resulting permissions look better. Now, anyone in the finance group (or the user owner root) have total access to the folder and its contents:

drwxrwx---. 2 root root 4096 Jul 6 15:35 finance

If any other user tries to access the shared folder, they won’t be able to do so. Great! Now our finance group can put documents in a shared place.

Other notes

There are additional ways to manipulate these permissions. For example, you may want any files in this folder to be set as owned by the group finance. This requires additional settings not covered in this article, but stay tuned to the Magazine for more on that topic soon.

By Amber Neely
Sunday, July 07, 2019, 02:22 pm PT (05:22 pm ET)

Bill Gates has spoken of Steve Jobs’ ability to mesmerize people an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS show, equating Jobs’ talent to magic.

According to Bloomberg, Bill Gates was impressed by Steve Jobs’ ability to take a firm that was “on a path to die” and turn it into one of the most valuable companies to date. He claimed that this was largely because Steve Jobs possessed an almost magical ability to mesmerize people.

“I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, but because I’m a minor wizard, the spells don’t work on me,” said Gates.

Gates also went on to discuss Jobs’ ability to innately understand what made both people and products a worthwhile investment.

“I have yet to meet any person who [could rival Jobs] in terms of picking talent, hyper-motivating that talent, and having a sense of design of, oh, this is good [or] this is not good,” Gates continued.

CNN’s segment is the latest in a series of interviews with many publications, in which Gates has spoken specifically about Apple. In one recent conversation, Gates expressed regret over not successfully competing with Apple in the mobile market.

“The greatest mistake is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is,” he said. “That is, Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform.”

CNN has not released the interview online yet, but has featured a prior Gates’ interview in which he discussed his thoughts on government regulation of technology firms, as well as what he would have done differently.

Quadplay, a fantasy console by CasualEffects, was just released for free, open sourced under the LGPL3 license.  Fantasy consoles are virtual consoles, often with specifications similar to classic hardware such as NES or Gameboy, often with a easy to use programming language, and Quadplay is no exception.

The specifications of the virtual hardware is as follows:

• 60 fps @ 384 x 224 pixels = 12:7 aspect ≈ 16:9.3
• 4096 sRGB (4:4:4) colors
• Hundreds of built-in sprites, sounds, and fonts
• Program in PyxlScript, a friendly Python-like language
• Order-independent 4-bit (16-level) alpha transparency
• Native 2.5D graphics via z-order
• 9.4 MB of total sprite memory
• Up to 64 sprite and font sheets of up to 1024×1024
• Four 10-button gamepads (D-pad + ⓐⓑⓒⓓ + ⓟⓠ)
• Optional 192 x 112, 128 x 128, and 64 x 64 screen modes
• Free and open source

The console and programming environment is remarkably well documented.  The source code for quadplay is available on GitHub.  The name CasualEffects may seem familiar, they are also responsible for the G3D Innovation Engine we covered earlier, as well as the simpler Nano Jammer virtual console, among other projects.

Check out quadplay in action in the video below.

GameDev News

During Nintendo’s recent Shareholder Q&A, company president Shuntaro Furukawa was asked what the video game giant would do in the event of a “hostile takeover” if another company wanted its intellectual property.

Furukawa responded by explaining how Nintendo had not adopted any “anti-takeover” measures, but if anything did happen, it had the necessary systems in place to counter it:

We have not adopted what are generally called anti-takeover measures. However, in the case that we face a hostile takeover that would damage the value of the company or the common interest of the company’s shareholders, we do have systems in place, both within the company and in connection with outside experts for such an occurrence, to take all legal and appropriate steps against it even if we have not proactively put preventive measures in place.

He finished up by saying the company would continue to consider how it would respond to such a scenario in the future:

Going forward, we will continue to investigate how we would respond to a hostile takeover.

Nintendo provided a similar response to this question during a Q+A session in March.

What are your thoughts about this? Tell us down below.

An awesome little game to come out recently (on Steam and Switch) is Gato Roboto, which can be thought of as Metroid… but inside the suit isn’t a woman but a cat, and the cat can get out of the suit and do cat things even the suit can’t do, like climb walls.

It’s very fun, and funny, and a blast to play and watch. Its creators graciously listened to some questions we had about it; their answers are provided below.

Who are you, and what is Gato Roboto?

We are Doinksoft, a development team based in Eugene, Oregon. The three members of Doinksoft are Britt Brady, Cullen Dwyer, and Joseph Bourgeois. Our individual duties vary between projects, but generally our roles are something like “Britt- Art and Sound, Cullen and Joseph- Programming.”

Britt and Cullen have been working together for the last 4 years, initially as the development duo Cowboy Color, and subsequently as members of Doinksoft. In the Cowboy Color days, they released the local multiplayer game Chargeshot and the arcade throwback The Handsome Mr. Frog, along with several game jam titles.

Cowboy Color was acquired by Nicalis in 2017. Joseph made various small games, released to sites like itch.io and newgrounds.com, before catching Britt’s attention with The Adventures of Butt Saves Christmas at the end of 2016. Britt and Joseph slowly started working together to expand Britt’s Metroid-style prototype, which eventually became Gato Roboto.

After leaving Nicalis in 2018, Britt and Cullen were in need of work, and the three Doinks came together to pitch Gato Roboto to publishers. The idea for the game, tentatively called “Catroid”, was to make something inspired by the original 8-bit and 16-bit Metroid titles, with a charming story/world and a more accessible difficulty level.

We defined the scope of the game right away, to make sure that our development timeline was attainable, and that all the maps fit together in a logical way. Deciding on a small handful of areas, comprised of 6 maps, we wanted to make an experience that could be completed in 3-5 hours for most players. With this scope in mind we were able to quickly choose a gameplay focus for each area, in addition to defining other mechanics and visual features that we could use to differentiate the maps, despite the apparent limitations of the graphical style.

The most immediate thing people would notice about Gato Roboto is its visual simularities to Minit & Downwell, that purposely old-school, monochrome look. Why did you decide to go with that?

Brady: Aesthetically in general I like to consider Gato Roboto more lo-fi than retro. While there is obviously a retro influence, our restrictions are self-imposed and follow no pre-existing retro console’s specifications. Therefore, we can take the things that we like from retro visuals/audio and expand them in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in the past.

One of the main reasons the game is black and white is simply from the game’s origins as a hobby project. I initially created Gato Roboto to practice programming and thought that the 1-bit limitation would help me to save time when making assets. The visual style inspired me to explore some interesting lo-fi sound design and music, aspects that persisted once my programming duties were taken over by my capable collaborators.

Gato Roboto is what’s often called a “Metroidvania,” an exploratory game where you often backtrack to old areas with new powers. Gato Roboto makes heavy use of this gimmick: as a cat you can do things entirely differently than in the suit. It’s an excellent advance upon what is now a very much-used and time-worn genre. What were your inspirations?

Bourgeois: The inspiration for the original demo, which was made by Britt during a holiday break from work, was the Metroid-like Hero Core. The idea at the time was to make a small game, consisting of a single map and a few abilities.

After I started working with Britt on expanding the demo, I saw his animation of the cat entering the mech suit, which surprised me because the armored character was not very cat-like in appearance. Upon seeing this, I immediately thought about one of my childhood favorites, Blaster Master. We discussed adding the cat / mech dynamic and within a few days it was part of the game.

Some months later, Cullen started helping out with programming and level design. He did a comprehensive study/playthrough of the 2D Metroid games, and titles such as Metroid Fusion and Super Metroid became direct influences for the map design in Gato Roboto.

Regarding the game’s narrative and NPC design, the work of Daisuke Amaya was probably a subconscious influence. The three of us share an admiration for Cave Story and Kero Blaster, and I think we all would like to create something with that sort of charm.

You can exit your suit at any time, but as a cat your abilities are very different than in the suit. How did you manage to design the map so that you can’t trap yourself through exploration?

Dwyer: Initially, we were pretty lazy with the implementation of gating for Mech or Cat sections. Obviously, the cat can fit through small spaces, climb walls, and swim, where the mech cannot do any of those things.

We started with that in preliminary level design sketches, but ran into situations that you may want to have only accessible by the Mech, for instance, battle lock rooms would be annoying if you could squeeze into them in Cat-Mode and only have the option of dying. To remedy this, we made (most) battle lock rooms only trigger if you enter the room as the Mech, and created Metroid-styled blast doors which can only be opened with bullets, and which close if you try to exit the Mech.

A general rule of thumb when designing new areas was to gate “Mech-only” areas with double-sided blast doors, unless we came up with a clever or unique alternate solution to ensure that you have the Mech with you. The placement of savepoints, given that they also transport the Mech to you, were decided not only for points of respite, but to ensure that if you dropped the Mech somewhere unintended, you would have a way to get a new one.

The core of any Metroidvania is the exploratory abilities you pick up, both their overt uses (double-jumping!) and less obvious ones (rocket recoil!) How did you pick the abilities for this game, and design the map around them? Did you find it difficult?

Dwyer: In Gato Roboto, rather than designing unique new power-ups, we wanted to take typical and recognizable ones and put a spin on them. For instance, the rockets don’t use ammunition, instead we have them on a cooldown so that they still feel limited and can’t be spammed, but also you never have to farm for ammo. On top of that, they also offer rocketjump-style recoil, making them a movement mechanic.

The Spinner double-jump item is a mix between a riff on the Screw Attack from Metroid, and Sonic the Hedgehog‘s jump. When we designed it, we wanted to make it immediately understandable, but also unique-feeling to use.

As far as designing levels around these, the most important thing was probably designing all of the movement mechanics and upgrades ahead of time so we could test how they work in tandem. Can I get here with the rockets but without the Spinner? Can I only get here with the Spinner? We intentionally designed the first two main areas of the game to be able to technically be approached in either order (although there is an intended route), and had to test both areas with and without the items that you acquire in the prior in order to make sure it was technically possible.

We liked, while designing a relatively linear Metroidvania, the idea of giving more advanced players options.

The explosions from your rockets have the potential to bounce your suit around and potentially move you into areas early. This skill-based movement option is reminiscent of Metroid‘s bomb jumping. Was this intentional? What do you think about hiding secret areas, or even important areas, behind obstacles with a high skill requirement?

Brady: Technical rocket jumping was one of my favorite features in Gato, ever since the original prototype. I love when shooting affects movement, such as the kickback from Cave Story’s machine gun (which has always been a huge inspiration to me) and the rocket jumping in Quake.

During development, we all seemed to really enjoy this aspect of the game and started to get pretty good at it. From the beginning, we wanted to make sure to reward those who perfected the rocket jump by letting them get to certain areas out of sequence. There is even a Steam achievement for beating the double jump section of the game with only the rocket upgrade.

The rocket temperature gauge is a nice little piece of UI design. It immediately communicates both that rocket use is limited to every few seconds, and why. How did you come up with that idea, and how many tries did it take you to get it right?

Dwyer: The HUD was a very early design idea that we came up with when we were moving from our original pitch demo towards our first PAX demo, which would be more representative of the finished game. You’ll notice that the more upgrades you acquire, the more the HUD fills out when you are inside of the Mech. When you’re out of the Mech, the only HUD you see is a panel that contains the playspace.

We did this because we wanted to communicate that there are many differences between playing as a cat and playing as a cat inside of a robot suit. We like to think of it as what Kiki sees when she is piloting the Mech.

The rocket UI is a piece I’m particularly proud of. It didn’t really take a lot of “tries” to get right per se, but more a lot of iteration and improvement. While I was designing it, I spent a good day or so adding as much character to it as I could, while at the same time trying to make it simple and communicate a few simple things.

First, it needed to display like a temperature gauge and show you approximately how many shots you might have left before overheating. Secondly, it needed to show you when it was overheated and unusable (this is when it wiggles out of control and what would say “20° C” now spills random characters to the screen.) Finally, it needed to show you if you are able to shoot a rocket or not. There’s a gentle little pop and a sound effect and the grayed out button indicator re-illuminates. All together, it created this really lively and reactive display!

More difficult than creating the UI for it was deciding exactly how much temperature a rocket costs, how long it takes to cool down, and how long it takes for it to no longer be overheated and unavailable. Our initial default was being able to shoot three rockets in rapid succession before overheating, and the overheating would take about twice as long to cool. This was fun, but giving the player three rockets to begin with allowed them to get pretty much anywhere on the screen by tech jumping, making the Spinner kind of useless.

By the time we finished the UI, we settled on a base of two rockets that could be fired without overheating, and a quicker cooldown. This lets you shoot rockets about as often, but without allowing you to spam as many in instant succession. We did make increasing the efficiency of the temperature gauge an optional item, however.

The right sound design can add a lot to a game. The echo-y sounds in Gato Roboto are quite charming, and the garbled voice dialogue reminds one of classic Rare games like Banjo-Kazooie. How did you decide on and create those kinds of sounds?

Brady: Sound design was a huge focus for me on this project, and wanting to avoid chiptunes, I thought of some of my favorite sounds from the past. I remembered old computer speakers cranked all the way up, boom boxes with worn-out tapes, an old keyboard playing low quality samples on built-in speakers, and synthesizers coming out of wood-framed speakers.

It led me to take a step back from making music centered around a DAW and to get experimental with my approach. So I arranged a set-up of analog synths (notably the Korg MS-20 and Moog DFAM), guitar pedals, tape recorders, and an SP-404 sampler. One of our early concerns was making the different biomes feel unique from one another, so I played a lot with drift and warp to give the environments an alien and mysterious vibe.

I also spent time making ambient sounds such as water drips, fans blowing, steam, and lava bubbling (boiling towels works well for this FYI). In the end we were really happy with how different the areas felt and I think audio played a big part in that.

For spoken dialog, the garble-style vocal chat is the only way to do it, in my opinion. I always find its effect to be so charming, while it also allows the same vocal sounds to be used across multiple languages, conveying a singular sense of character and personality. The first implementation came by surprise when Joseph added a simple dialog system for the intro of a boss fight. He chopped up some samples of inward-spoken gibberish (which actually made it into the final game) and inserted them into the scene. This is just one of the many instances where we connected on an almost psychic level, as a team.

The best bits of metroidvanias, I’d say, is the finding of secret areas, unmapped and bonus-filled chambers in unexpected places. It’s one of those things… you want people to find them, but don’t want to make them too easy to spot. What do you think is too easy, or too hard, to find? Did playtesting change your opinion?

Bourgeois: In Gato, we wanted to make map exploration rewarding, without requiring too much back-tracking or repetition to find everything. Using the pause screen map, the player can find 90 percent of the game’s optional upgrades. However, even the more hidden upgrades can be discovered through environmental cues in the level design.

A few hidden paths can only be found by accident or exhaustive exploration, but these are Easter Eggs that don’t contribute to the player’s abilities or completion rate. We didn’t want the players who overlooked these secrets to feel penalized, and intended for the Easter Eggs to be their own rewards.

During playtesting, refinement of the mini-map was the biggest exploration-related change. An early version of the mini-map showed all rooms of an area, explored or not, and this was noted by most of our feedback testers. They would have no context for the sprawling maps and would easily lose direction during a playthrough. In response, we added map discoverability, which was helpful in guiding players.

Pointing out the adjacent unexplored areas made it so that the player always knew how to progress forward, or where to look for potential undiscovered health expansions and cartridges. We added mini-map visibility for save points and area exits, but otherwise left the map uncluttered, favoring clarity over complexity.

In this 2017 GDC session, game designer Katharine Neil gives an overview of some of the game design tools available that might help game designers improve their work.

Drawing on design tool evaluation research, this talk introduces and gives an overview of some of the game design tools available today. As well as tools that can help with common tasks in level design, game system design and narrative design, you’ll learn about experimental, AI-powered tools that can extend design possibilities using technologies like procedural content generation.

Neil also delivered frank assessments of the benefits and limitations of using these tools and how they might impact your design process, as well as concrete examples of design problems that these tools have helped solve.

Her talk was a bit of fresh air and perspective on the game design process, so if you missed seeing it live (or just want to refresh yourself) take advantage of the fact you can now watch it free on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or XRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

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