General Permissions Weirdness

Hello all of you,

This is my first post here in the SuSE Linux Forums. I bought SLED 10.0 about the start of the year and was most impressed. What few problems I've encountered I've managed to fix myself since I've been around the block a few times. However, I've notice some permission weirdness of late; at least that's the system's complaint.

• sudo apparently doesn't work though it's installed.
• Konsole Root shell doesn't always allow installs. I must login as root in KDE or Gnome (very bad).
• I cannot burn disks unless I login to a graphic root shell.
• Just now I tried running make and/or checkinstall on fvwm-crystal-3.0.2 with various degrees of failure, even logged in as root in KDE.

I tried to solve the disk burning issue with chmod with no result. Permissions are wide open where needed. I didn't like logging into a graphic shell as root, but had no choice. Make and checkinstall report files not found that are obviously there (I can read them). So, I'm a bit stumped. Any thoughts?

I also keep my own rpm repository and recently added oOo 2.0.4 there. Yast2 hung during the install and I had to kill Yast after an hour. Possibly I have a resource problem too.

Running SLED10.0 with some OpenSuSE; ReiserFS; Sony notebook PCG F680; Pentium III 700; 256MB RAM. 80GB HD partitioned for Reiser and XP NTFS dual-boot with a shared FAT32 for archiving.