As a total newcomer to Linux, open source and really anything other than MS I am struggling a bit. Could anyone advise on a few things. First I am trying to install XAMMP on Linux Mandriva Spring 2009. Mandriva is running on Sun Virtual Machine over XP. Install instructions say to extract Laamp to /opt directory which I assume is the one in root. Everytime I try I get an error message about insufficient permissions. I have looked to edit these but cannot do this either. I also had a the same problem with Ubuntu which was a clean installation on independant harddrive. It is probably really simple to someone in the know. Any thoughts or advice greatly appreciated