Two quick FC3 Qs (trying to resolve things I know how to do in Mandrake but now in FC3):

1) I have a DVD-RW drive and can burn just fine as root, but not as a regular user. I never had to do anything in Mandrake to make this work -- what do I have to do in FC3 to get this to work?

2) What do I need to change to have the system boot into a shell prompt, not starting GDM or whatever automatically?

..oh, and while I'm here:

3) Can I run up2date from the command line?

Thanks so much.

1)

I don't know this for myself, but I think others have posted saying that it's an issue with certain versions of K3B (and maybe cdrecord). Look around. I've seen this problem mentioned many times.

2)

I believe you need to change your default runlevel. Different distro's use different numbers to mean different things, but I believe the convention is to have full GUI at runlevel 5, and text only at runlevel 3.

My inittab file says:

# The default runlevel is defined here
id:5:initdefault

Try changing the 5 to a 3.

3)

I don't run fedora or redHat, but it would surprise me if you couldn't. I'd start with:

man up2date

having just installed FC3 recently and running SuSe previously, I noticed the same thing with K3b, I had to modify the permissions on /dev/hdc and all was well. There were some warnings about stability doing this as opposed to running as root, but I haven't experienced any issues to speak of.

as far as up2date from the command line, yes it is most certainly possible. I recall doing this all the time on an older RH7-9 install.