Hi all,
Following a few late nights I fianlly have a nice debian 2.2r3 installation.
Quite pleased as it goes.
However it is not without a number of difficulties so if anyone can offer
any input I'd be very grateful.
Sorry that these may be quite simple, no doubt I'll find solutions
eventually by the usual methods (read alot of stuff, try a few ideas, undo
those ideas, try some more.... rejoice at 4:00am that it finally works!!)
1)pppd is happily installed but doesn't work. I'm using wvdial to connect
(from my old config file) which seems to work fine. A connection is
established then wvdial goes quiet for a few secs (no activity) then it
complains that it cannot get a carrier so messages : 'starting pppd and
hoping for the best' before giving up.
I imagine that for some reason wvdial is not able to hand over to pppd.
I also have to be root to get this to work. I have changed the permissions
on /dev/modem to allow users rw access but I don't trust this setting....
any ideas on how to enable wvdial/ppp for all users.
In the past /dev/modem has always been crw-rw-r-- root root with no
problems so there must be something else (elevating privs or something...
quite frankly I'd rather not elevate unless the relevant proggie(s) drop
privs after initialising modem...
2)I can only run X as root. If i try to run it as a general user I get error
"User is not authorised to Run XServer". I have checked the permissions on
all of the binaries I know of and they all have lowest order execute bit set
(I haven't changed them - that is how they were installed). Is there an X
Setting I'm missing?
3) I have libjpeg installed but I cannot display jpeg images. If i attempt
to open one in electric eyes - nothing, gimp - nothing, mozilla - the jpeg
info (but not the image...). I dunno.
4) Adding menu items to gnome doesn't work. Programs are shown in the menu
editor but don't appear in the menus themselves. Most (but not all) gnome/x
apps I install from apt-get do not show up in the menus (hence the
menu-editor).
5) How do I change my default window-manager (red hat had a useful thing
called switchdesk so I never learned where this was defined.. maybe
.xsession/ or something.
6) Sound : I have a Creative Soundblaster 128 which I can't seem to get
working, again red-hat always made my life easy here with sndconfig. In the
absence of that I need to find and load the correct kernel module. Buggered
if I know how. Intended to re-use the lines from my old modules.conf -
actually its conf.modules but now I find that that is deprecated - and the
format has changed and i need to run some utility to add new lines to it
(name escapes me at the moment) which means I need to find the module -
which I can't.... grrrr. - so :
7) Kernel Compile : thought it would pay to do a kernel compile instead,
specifying the modules I need and get around things that way. So, make
xconfig was fine, found a useful sound driver among other things, make
bzImage dies when compiling boot.c. Error : as86 command not found, the
makefile for the relevant directory specifies AS86=as86. I have no program
called as86, changing it to 'as' gives another error : as - unknown
option -O (which suggests to me that I am missing a binary called as86, does
anyone know anything about this or how do i find which package has this
binary.
I have had no luck finding anything called as86!
Is there something debian that I should know ? (Martyn mentioned in a
previous mail
Any thoughts - any at all - gladly appreciated
Cheers
Earl