These aren't the permissions you're looking for

A little more tweaking of the setup; I'm used to using the F-keys to do various things in Emacs, so I changed the default configuration (where they adjust volume, brightness etc) to need the Fn key to be pressed too (System Preferences, Keyboard, check "Use the F1-F12 keys for custom actions"). I also tweaked the Exposé settings to just do things with F11 and F12 (not F9-F11), and to add the top-right and bottom-right mouse corners as triggers too. (System Preferences, Exposé )

I've also been going through the files I transferred across from my Linux box and correcting the permissions. Because I did the transfer via a USB drive, basically everything ended up with mode -rwxrwxrwx, so I needed to get rid of the execute bit on regular files that weren't scripts, and to get rid of write permission on any RCS/*,v files and their corresponding workfiles.

This isn't that exciting, except that it revealed a feature of the filesystem that I hadn't realized—there's an extra layer of permissioning on top of the normal Unix modes. Even as root (which I enabled via Applications, Utilities, NetInfo Manager, Security, Enable Root User) I'd get:

  % chmod -x file
  chmod: file: operation not permitted

This is because the file has been locked, which is visible (and alterable) in the Finder file Info window. The chflags uchg file and chflags nouchg file commands lock and unlock files from the command line respectively. I've still no idea why some (and there seemed no pattern as to which) of the transferred files ended up locked but most didn't.