Well, I finally got Debian Sid (2.6 smp kernal) and GRUB to play nicely with WinXP. I have KDE3.2, and think that I'll use it as my desktop of choice. I used aptitude at the end of the webinstall and have a few extras with my distro. Now, I do have a few problems.

Sound only works under the Root Logon, as it says that my user logon doesn't have permissions. Is there a way, as root, that Ican call up all the group? I know the files I need belong to "root" and "-audio", so I was wondering if I could make my user acct part of the -audio group? Is there an easy way to do this via a tool? how about via command line, using a shell (defaulted to DASH I think, should I change it to BASH or something else?)

Next, I cannot seem to get Synaptic to work. I select it from the KDE menu under Root, and the hourglass spins, but then it simply vanishes? This also happens with Ethereal, which I grabbed via aptitude. Advice?

To give sims audio privileges:
adduser sims audio

Sigh. a new problem too. It seems that when using any web browser, it takes a long, long time to resolve a host. After that, it loads the page quickly. Is there something causing this in Linux? On the same network it seems much faster in windows Firefox.

Edit: I got Etherial and Synaptic to open under my user account but not Root for some reason. Also, could this slowness be linked to the fact that Ethereal cannot dected and eth0 card (like I remember it did in Knoppix 3.3). I have a Realtek Gigabit Lan chip on my laptop. I can still browse the web albiet slowly, but is there some driver or package I can get to fix this?

Also I noticed that a number of packages are installed (snort, ettercap, nmap), but are not accessable from the KDE internet bar. Some of them are only accessable in gnome, and others not at all. Is there a way to make sure that they are provided as shortcuts?

Thanks to sims! it worked!

in submenus of kde you should have a submenu debian with other programs not part of kde(most of the time, no icon...)

When I open the menu-editor I see the debian folder, but it does not appear when I press the KDE button. All the other folders in it do, but not the deb one for some reason? I'm using KDE 3.2.1. Any suggestion?

Chances are for that gig. ethernet card, it will take a kernel recompile to get it up to snuff. <http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html> for how to compile a kernel under debian. Its a little diffrent.


Menus are managed by a package called menu. Go man menu for more information.

Do you see a menu updating link in your settings in the kde menu? That's what I use to add new items to my menu. There's a scan button and it scans for all programs that aren't already in the kmenu.

Also, you have to delete the debian folder out of your menu editor because having that folder there messes up your kde menu. This is what you have to do when you upgrade to kde 3.2 through Mepis which is based on debian unstable.

I've used the menu updater which added a few things, but I still can't get Snort, Nessus, frozen-bubble and a few others into it. I'll try deleting the deb folder from the menu editor.

@geekzen- During boot up i notice it says initililizing eth0 Realtek Gigabit Lan XXXX_XXXX (serial number), so it seems that the OS understands what it is. Would this happen if the kernal needed to be recompiled.

If you see that module being uploaded after booting into the kernel, then it should be loading that module. If your ethernet is not working though after you login, then it needs tweaking in the module configuration.

It may or it may not be seeing it. The kernel is usually built with a database of all the known pci devices, so it may know what it is, but not how to use it.