Ownership and permissions

[Satyadarshin]

I'm using Xampp in parallel with PHPEclipse, or at least I'm trying to.

I don't have quite the same trouble as some other Mac users. Theoretically I could live without the GUI that Windows users are blessed with: there's automated controls inside the Eclipse IDE. But of course I still have to run ./mampp start as root, which I can't do from Eclipse.

The obvious solution is to change permissions on the Xampp directory, but I'm danged if I can figure out how to do it. I've examined my trusty Unix manual, but to no avail. Any ideas?