PITA 2: Edit my.cnf file in Ubuntu

I tried to bind the local machine's global address to allow the remote connections for mysql (5.1) in my.cnf file, it kept giving me:

Error: no write permission for file "my.cnf"

tried edit etc/mysql/my.cnf and gedit etc/mysql/my.cnf also tried to change the permission of the file and the mysql folder by chmod with no success.

Until I found out putting sudo is necessary before every command if the user account is not root.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7077569

Used sudo gedit etc/mysql/my.cnf and it worked.