Hi,
I recently installed my first debian, sarge. And I had to fight every step of the way, since I was used to suse and mandrake. Well my system is up and running but these are some of the problems that are irking me the most.

1. Xterm does not display colours. So all the display is in black and white while I was used to the colorful displays in Mandrake. Even vim does not show any colours while opening files. I've tried tweaking .Xresources, .Xdefaults,app-defaults/XTerm and app-defaults/XTerm-color files but nothing helps. Can somebody tell me the exact solution?

2. Non-root user cannot access the soundcard correctly. While running xmms as root I can get the sound, but when non-privileged used tries running xmms I get an error saying that "sound card is either blocked or not configured properly". What is the reason?

3. Non-root user cannot write to a mounted FAT drive. Here is the fstab snippet:

/dev/hda7 /mnt/win_d vfat defaults,user 0 0
/dev/hdb8 /mnt/win_z vfat defaults,user 0 0

4. I have some ISO images residing on FAT drive which I want to mount automatically at boot time. Ofcourse I can mount them manually later but I want them mounted at the boot time. The following code from /etc/fstab does not work:
/mnt/win_z/gsck/gsdke.iso /mnt/gda1 iso9660 defaults,user 0 0

5. And finally can somebody tell me how to install "xview" on debian? Apt-get cannot find any package with the name "xview".

Thnx for any help

1. I think the option is in .bashrc, /etc/profile, or .bash_profile (I got this to work once a long time ago and have since forgotten -- try google)

2. Add your user to the "audio" group. That worked on my system anyway.

3. Make sure your user is part of the "user" group and also you might add "rw" to the fstab options

4. I think it's another option in fstab like "auto" or something like that (again google is your friend)

5. try apt-cache search xview. You probably need something like "xview-client" or the like.

Thanx for your suggestions.

apt-cache search xview worked beautifully. Thnx a lot. As for other suggestions

1. .bashrc and others are startup scripts. What I want to know is what variables should I set? Tried googling, got confused!

2. My user is already added to the audio group. Here is the line from /etc/group
audio:x:29:cheema

I'll try your other suggestions when I'll be in a mood to reboot my machine.

You shouldn't have to reboot, just unmount the partitions, change the fstab, and then remount the partitions.

Did a quick search and found this fstab entry for a fat32 partition:

/dev/hda3 /mnt/windows vfat defaults,user,auto,umask=000 0 0

Actually the problem with the permissions on FAT disk is that, when booted, the write permissions are available only for the ROOT. When I unmount /mnt/win_d from root and mount the same directory from user "cheema" i get the full write permissions. So I just want my user "cheema" to have write permission after booting, without my manual unmounting and mounting.

My guess is that the "umask" option may help you out, but I guess I don't really know for sure...

Hi,

1. Colours

-- Xterm colours:

In my ~/.bashrc, I have the following lines uncommented:
-- Vim colours:

In my ~/.vimrc, I have the following line:
(If you have no .vimrc simply do:
touch .vimrc ; echo "syntax on" > .vimrc)

4. I think it depends on the <options> column contents of the /etc/fstab file. For example, if the "noauto" option appears, the filesystem will not be mounted automatically at boot time (expl. floppy).

5. xview
Try apt-cache search xview to get the list of the packages you can install and which could match your query (xview).

Good luck.

--
Léa Massiot

Thnx leamassiot. Sitting in office right now. Will try your suggestion once I get back home.

For the color thingy you can even have a more beautiful terminal : you have the PS1 (prompt) displayed in yellow:

in my .bashrc I have this:

# set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color)
case "$TERM" in
xterm-color)
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:
\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '
;;
*)
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
;;
esac


...

I manage once to get $TERM set to xterm-color (maybe in /etc/default) but not anymore Did not really search so I made a shortcut to open a konsole and to set TERM to xterm-color

Thnx leamassiot. Your suggestion worked.

Have you checked the permissions on /dev/dsp or /dev/audio?

Here is the result of the commands

$ls -l /dev/dsp
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 3 2005-02-26 12:09 /dev/dsp
$ls -l /dev/audio
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 4 2005-02-26 12:09 /dev/audio

And I'm added to the audio group. Here is the line from /etc/group
audio:x:29:cheema

So I guess its not the issue with permissions.

So after 4 days of configuring, my first debian is left with just one major irritant . My soundcard does not seem to work for non-root users. I checked the permissions and the audio group but got no clues. I'm attaching the output xmms gives when run by non-privileged user.

** WARNING **: oss_open(): Failed to open audio device (/dev/dsp): Permission denied

Looks like some other application is using the soundcard. How can I check?

Hello,

Well, I had never tried before to know whether my soundcard worked or not under my Debian system. So I did the following thing:

$ su
root_password
$ apt-get install xine-ui
$ su lea
$ xine &

I introduced an audio CD in the player, and actually... it worked.
You could try that too.



--
Léa Massiot