chmod doesn't seem to have any effect.

Would love to know though why the gui doesn't work. It
would be a lot faster to drag and drop than use the command
line for some of what I'd like to do.

Not that anyone uses floppies anymore but you'd think something
as basic as this ought to work. It did in Mandriva, though
that was KDE. I tried Kubuntu but samba was broken so I
stuck with gnome. I guess I have to decide what broken
features I have to live with.