I am enjoying linux and learning a lot a about it by fixing the problems I have, even if it does a mean a reinstall to fix the missing libraries (rather than removing all of them and reinstall them).

But there are two things I can't get around (and then I should be all set).

The first is this. I have an ATI TV Wonder VE. When I go in full screen mode it is fine. However, when I come back out...the desktop resolution is thinner (maybe 1024 x 680) and seems to have a lot of scanlines. This never happened in Mandrake 9.0 and I don't know what would be causing it now? Any ideas?

The second problem should be relatively easy. At boot I want to make all my mnt directories (my FAT32 drives, and a flash reader) read and writable by users (or just change the permissions to the mounts....I really don't care...they are currently only writable through root...as root owns them). What is the easiest way for this to be accomplished?

Thanks for the help.

ATI TV Wonder VE: Sounds like a module problem with your video card. What distro and video card are you using? Check out this site -- http://www.linuxlogin.com/linux/ati_tv.php

FAT32 drives: as root, edit your /etc/fstab and mount your fat32 with umask=000 to make it read/writable by all users (umask=022 is read/writable only for root).

As an aside, note that umask is a valid parameter only for vfat partitions; umask is invalid for other filesystems (ext3, xfs, reiserfs). This is a problem that I am researching, since I would like to make an xfs partition read/writable for all users at boot (I suspect the answer lies in changing the group permissions, but I haven't figured it out yet). If anyone has a solution, please post.

So, getting back to your fat32 drive, add the following lines to /etc/fstab (substitute hdc1 with the actual device name of your fat32 drive):

# mount FAT32 drive
/dev/hdc1 /mnt/fat32 vfat defaults,umask=000,rw 0 0

It is a ATI TV Wonder VE and I'm using Mandrake 9.1. I went to that site a long time ago and saved it. I follow it to set up my card. Like I said, in 9.0 I did nothing different but didn't have this problem like I do is 9.1. It's just interesting.

I don't think it's umask that matters as that is already in my fstab (umask=000)...but rather the rw...I think that should work...so I will try it in a few (I really just don't want to see that write protected symbol on my My Documents folder on my Windows drive anymore).

As for the other filesystems...try chmod...

chmod --help

just to see what you can do. But you can change permissions that way for Linux type filesystems....the fat drives don't recognize those flags.

thanks