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