I want to give ordinary users the ability to mount a device. I was told that I needed to edit the sudoers file. How do I do this? In what way do I need to edit it. I got as far as vi sudoers, but don't know what to do from there. thanks for your help.

You must use a special command 'visudo' to edit your '/etc/sudoers' file. It will start the editor set in the EDITOR environment variable or vi if it doesn't have any value. Your sudo package should have a very well commented 'sudoers.sample' file, the man page is a mess, specially if you aren't used to BNF notation. The home page of sudo is: http://www.sudo.ws/ Hope this helps.

I looked at the sudo file (visudo), but couldn't figure out what to un-comment. (I'm assuming that that is what I should do) I tried the line that says something about users and mount (including cdrom, etc). When I tried to exit (:wq) I got an error "This is a read only. Override with !" So I typed :!wq. I was then told that there were no changes. What am I doing wrong???

You have to edit the file with root. or either sudo into root to change the file.

You will want to add a line like: %users ALL=/sbin/mount /mnt/cdrom,/sbin/umount /mnt/cdrom NOPASSWD: ALL

I tried adding such a line, with /mnt/usb substituted for the cdrom, but I still get the error "mount: only root can do that " I added "%users ALL=/sbin/mount /mnt/usb,/sbin/umount /mnt/usb NOPASSWD: ALL " all on one line. Do I need tofollow your line changes as well?

Nope...it should all be on one line. How are you then trying to use the mount command as a user? It should be: $ sudo mount /mnt/usb Another alternative would be to add the "user" flag in /etc/fstab. Have a look at the entry for your cd or floppy drive in /etc/fstab....I am assuming that ordinary users are able to mount a CD?