Quote Originally Posted by LoneWolf218 View Post
Rob this response you gave another user closely resembles my problem. I open terminal window and type sudo gedit /ect/hosts to add a line. When gedit opens it is a blank page. I'm wondering if maybe this is because I run a dual boot system with winXP. If I have to direct the command to the partition and then the file system of Ubuntu I'm going to need help as I've never done this. I'm just trying to add a line for the iesnare mpsnare, but so far haven't found any advice that will make the edit work.
It is nothing to do with Windows unless you are trying to do it from Windows - your Ubuntu installation should be in a Linux file-system which Windows can't change the contents in a valid way for your Ubuntu installation to remain bootable as far as I know - 3rd party apps for Windows could exist to allow this but I doubt you have one.

Assuming you spell 'etc' correctly when you are in terminal you should use 'gksudo' because it is designed for launching 'g'nome applications with root privileges where sudo is designed for command-line programs - not severely invalid to 'sudo gedit' just more valid to 'gksudo gedit' instead.

An alternative thing to do is to open nautilus, the file browser, with root privileges and have a look around the system using that (much much more looking than touching)
Code:
gksudo nautilus
The terminal you type that into may report a couple of errors but usually not enough to stop the 'rooted' file-browser appearing - whatever you 'spawn' from this file-browser will be spawned with root privileges so you can edit the system files, unpack archives belonging to root, and cause mayhem in your OS, just look at /etc/hosts for now

Please be careful with 'rooted' nautilus and, if the terminal doesn't "free" when you close this instance of nautilus, press [CTRL]+[C] to free the command-line in the terminal.