permission denied on a file in freeBsd 4.11

I have no knowledge of freebsd but i loaded it up and added a new user.

I then worked out how to download from the net for files, I then su'd and went and downloaded the ati video driver i need for X , when I try to run it (./ati-driver-installer-8.16.20.run ) i get permission denied and it is really annoying me now, I have been trying to load it for 2 days !! , I have read the manual and that seems written in sanscrit for the newbie and is totally confusing , can anyone tell me what i need to do to get this to run please ?

Try this:
chmod 755 ati-driver-installer-8.16.20.run
./ati-driver-installer-8.16.20.run

The chmod line turns on run permissions for the file. Read man chmod for more details.

AWESOME !! , I spent days reading the manual , enough to make a man cry in frustration, now I get write failed :file system full , god knows why , i only have BSD installed on a 120G hd . Sigh . This sure aint like windows where i can see everything : )

But at least what you said worked for that I am gratefull.

Show me the output of the df command and also where you're running this ati-driver-installer-8.16.20.run command (type pwd to show the current directory). I'll bet you're doing something funky somewhere.

pwd = /root

df =
filesystem 1K blocks used avail cap mounted on
/dev/ads0s1a 128990 128206 -9534 108% /
/dev/ads0s1f 257998 20 237340 0% /tmp
/dev/ads0s1g 116514412 1872844 105320416 2% /usr
/dev/ad0s1e 257998 8640 228720 4% /var
procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc

sorry about the mess , but i cant access it from here to c/p

There's your problem.

RULE NUMBER 1: NEVER download anything to the / partition (which is where /root is located). Always put your downloads in /usr/local/src or somewhere like that. Note that your /usr partition is only 2% full.
Read man hier for more.
There's a very good reason why the / partition is only supposed to be 100-128 MB or so in size. Only the basic tools to get the OS up and running should be here. Anything else should be put under the /usr partition.

With that said, let's see about recovering your mess. (In all the below commands, you could substitute /usr/local/src/downloads or /usr/local/downloads or something else instead of /usr/local/src if you like).
1. cd /usr/local/src
If this doesn't work, then do mkdir -p /usr/local/src and try again.
2. mv /root/ati-driver-installer-8.16.20.run /usr/local/src
This moves the file from /root to /usr/local/src.
3. Do another df here and make sure that the / partition usage has dropped. If it hasn't dropped right away, wait for a few mins and try again. It should drop below 100%.. If you have addtional files that you downloaded to /root, you should move those into /usr/local/src tree as well.
4. cd /usr/local/src[b]
5. [b]./ati-driver-installer-8.16.20.run

Thanks , I guess funky wasn't the word !!. will do as you said, if that doesn't work will reinstall. I did actualy re-download it into a /home/mine/ directory and do what you previously told me to, and i get a ./ati-installer.sh: 90 Syntax error: Bad Substitution , so I dont think its going to install after all this effort which annoys the hell out of me.

Do an ls -l / and print the output here.
I want to make sure that /home is not on the / partition . If it is, you'll still have the same problem of filling up the / partition again.

Only way I can do that is on here ( its a huge list !! ) and i cant access it from here , for some reason I cant ssh into it . I could earlier but i dont know why not now. However I will do so as soon as i can get into it.

Sorry it took so long.

I still cannot get that driver to install, so Ifear i will never get the chance to use FreeBSD , I still get that error .

Games# ls -l /
total 8676
-rw-r--r-- 2 root wheel 802 Jan 21 2005 .cshrc
drwx------ 2 root wheel 512 Sep 13 20:50 .mozilla
-rw-r--r-- 2 root wheel 251 Jan 21 2005 .profile
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 6117 Jan 21 2005 COPYRIGHT
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1024 Sep 13 21:00 bin
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 512 Sep 13 21:02 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Sep 13 20:20 cdrom
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Sep 13 20:20 cdrom1
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10 Sep 13 20:30 compat -> usr/compat
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 20992 Sep 13 22:06 dev
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Sep 13 20:20 dist
drwxr-xr-x 16 root wheel 2048 Sep 13 22:07 etc
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 9 Sep 13 20:50 home -> /usr/home
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Sep 13 21:53 host
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4388756 Jan 21 2005 kernel
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4388756 Jan 21 2005 kernel.GENERIC
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Jan 21 2005 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 4608 Sep 13 20:56 modules
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Sep 13 21:53 net
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 512 Sep 13 22:07 proc
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Sep 13 20:56 root
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 2048 Sep 13 21:00 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 1024 Sep 13 20:20 stand
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 11 Sep 13 20:56 sys -> usr/src/sys
drwxrwxrwt 7 root wheel 512 Sep 13 22:06 tmp
drwxr-xr-x 17 root wheel 512 Sep 13 21:02 usr
drwxr-xr-x 21 root wheel 512 Jan 21 2005 var

well, your home directory looks like a good place to do things because it is symlinked to /usr/home. BTW, are you sure you downloaded a freebsd driver installer. Would you please show me the link where you got the driver from. I suspect this thing is expecting a bash shell, not tcsh.

Erm I cant now , I got absolutely fed up of it all and i decided to stick it on another machine with a nvidia card in , so that's now sorted out , kind of. Now I have another ! , I didn't realise Apache was installed on 5.4 , sooo I downloaded the latest from the web and installed it , then I couldn't get the web page to show so deleted it and I also deleted the original install as well without knowing it, however I cannot load it up again with sysinstall i get a error -1 or such.

I really shouldn't tinker untill I read the book ( i did but its like sanscrit to me ) .

Ignore that , I just reinstalled via ports so its ok now. Sigh.