Cannot change ownership when trying to establish chown
 

God afternoon everyone. I just want to thank all of you for letting me join. I am a noob when it comes to linux and control prompt so please bare with me. I am currently trying to install Heimdall-flash to my chromebook and I'm afraid that I've made a mistake. I successfully cloned /opt/heimdall/ but I can't seem to get my chown-R www-data /opt/heimdall/ to change ownership. I have struggled with this for several days. I know there is a method of changing ownership but I've just begun to learn to understand all the commands. Please any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks and have a great day.

Who owns /opt/heimdall/
If root owns it, then you'll need to be root to change it.

I have tried root and I keep getting the same response chown: changing ownership of '/opt/heimdall/vendor': operation not permitted. Any suggestions? I believe the owner is tylermade.net

Post the output of:

Are you typing the chown command this way:

It should be
Should be a space before the -R

This is what you said you entered which is why I asked

Yes I am putting a space between the chown: and -r. Any other Ideas? I am new to this and any advice is highly appreciated.

In principle, the following is correct:
However, there are a few conditions. You need to have permissions to change ownership. /opt/heimdall must reside on a filesystem that has a concept of ownership (as an example, FAT filesystems don't). And the files and directories whose ownership you want to change are not immutable.

Let's start with permissions. You have not yet shown us the output of ls -ld /opt/heimdall. I would also like to see the output of ls -l /opt/heimdall, without the d option. You say you have tried root - what exactly did you do?

Next, where does /opt/heimdall reside? Run lsblk -f to get clarity.

Immutability can be checked with the lsattr command. It is unlikely that /opt/heimdall is immutable, but to ensure it isn't, start with lsattr /opt.

Finally, Chromebooks run a somewhat nonstandard Linux I believe, and I hesitate with advice to be honest. How did you install Linux on this computer?

The "operation not permitted" error message in my experience usually means that either the filesystem that file (or directory) resides on does not support UNIX permissions (or any kind of permissions at all) as berndbausch mentioned above, or it's not a "regular file" (or a directory). The immutable bit is also another possibility, but I would agree with berndbausch that it's unlikely to be the case.

In any case, and as has been said, you need to SHOW US the output of

if you want us to be able to give you any concrete solutions. As the above command will not only show the permissions and ownership, it will also show us what kind of file it is - indicated by the first dash at the beginning of the permissions line.

You may also want to read our wiki about permissions too.