Well, I got debian 3.0r1 with the 2.4.18 kernel loaded and, after much reading, cursing, and gnashing of teeth, got my Nvidia GTS drivers installed (what a circus that was!!!) Anyway I'm discovering all the things that RH9 did by default that debian doesn't. So on with the questions:
Be advised... I was up 'til 2:00 an jacking with this so excuse me if I miss pertinent information.

I've got KDE loaded and I'm using xdm but would like to switch to kdm. Any good documentation on howto?

I'd like to have debian boot to init 3 and not go directly to gui. I don't want to ditch X alltogether but I like coming up in consloe first. Any suggestions?

My secondary cdrom, namely an IDE cdrw at hdd(?), that is not mounted. I'm pretty sure I'll need ide-scsi support but not sure how to get there feom here. BTW, my primary cdrom (an ide DVD drive) is seen as hdc and I can mount it.

lastly (for now), I've got a SCSI hdd that I didn't initialize during the install as it has data I want to save. It is seen as sda1 by fdisk. How do I go about getting debian to see it an mount (the low-level stuff.. I've got an ok handle on fstab.)

Thanx all for helping me wiggle my way through this...
Tony

All~
I've found the answer to this question:

>>I'd like to have debian boot to init 3 and not go directly to gui. I don't want to ditch X alltogether but I like coming up in console first. Any suggestions?<<

Answer: Stoping xwindows from starting
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...796#post493796

I'll continue to post answers as (if ) I find them to help other newbies...
Tony

I personally think Nvidia sucks.
You don't necessarily have to boot into runlevel 3 to do that (BTW: you can change the default runlevel in the line that says id:5:initdefault in /etc/inittab )

Just remove the link S<number>xdm that's in your /etc/rc5.d/ directory (assuming 5 is your runlevel) to stop running xdm at bootup time.
For kdm: maybe just try apt-get install kdm ?
Yup, to actually burn etc. you need ide-scsi. I don't know if it's in the kernel you are using though, try modprobe ide-scsi though it may be compiled in, you'd have to check that.
Well... Just adding it to fstab should do the trick I think
Make sure your mountpoint is an existing directory...

Regards
nukkel

I think i'm gonna upgrade to sid before I do anything. I found this link:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...223#post503223

on how to update to sid from woody.
I'm hoping that some things I want to do will be more apparent there (yeah, right) {;-)>> but at least I'll have a more updated system.
I've also found a good read on how to install an ide cdrw here:

http://www.justlinux.com/nhf/Hardwar..._to_Linux.html (Hope I don't get jammed up for linking to *gasp* another forum!!!)

The only one that is giving me fits is the scsi disk install. I've got a sneaking suspicion i'm gonna lose that data....

And you're right the nvidia driver install does suck, but I can't afford another vid card because I don't like the driver install.
Tony

This is quite simple and you should not lose anything. if you only want a temp mount then do mount -t xxx /dev/sda1 /mnt where xxx is the file system type eg linux=ext2 M$=vfat. If you want a permanent mount then create a mount point by adding a new directory under /mnt called say scsi and the edit you fstab with /dev/sda1 /mnt/scsi etc

Thanx!!
I'll give that a run when I get home this evening.
Damn I love this forum!!!
Tony

Well thanx to all thew help I received here I'vr gotten my system just about up to speed. But I've discovered that I've got a sound problem. The card is a SBLive! that is properly seen by sndconfig. I ran sndconfig and heard Linuses voice telling me how to say linux but the volume was really soft. SO I went jacking around with the Sound System settings in Control Panel. Tested it and no sound! I tried to run sndconfig again but it errored out with "an error occured while writing the config file." I'm not quite sure where to go on this one. Any further help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanx again,
Tony