How will I know if I have XFree86 installed and working. Does it switch to a GUI right away or do I have to install Gnome, kde, etc to find out IF I have a GUI?

Another dumb question:

When I mount a cdrom, I can 'cd /cdrom' and see the files on it. If I mount fd0, how come I can't do the same with it. I get "fd0 is not a directory"

I have no printer on my linux box and wish to print out a document. I would like to copy this document to a MS-DOS file system floppy and take the floppy to my Windows system and print out the document. Any information on how to do this would be appreciated (especially - how to make a MS-DOS fs floppy)

No, it won't switch on a GUI right away ... I'd suggest that
you try to run startx and see what happens.


Maybe it's called /floppy or /mnt/floppy, or /mnt/fd0 ...
Have a look in your /etc/fstab to learn more about
your system ;)


Once you find your floppy's mount-point you
can mount it and then copy your files onto it.

If the /etc/fstab says auto for the fd's file-system
all you need to do is put in a DOS formatted
floppy ... if you don't have one read "man mkdosfs"


Cheers,
Tink

try rebooting the machine first

seriously, try running 'startx', 'gdm' or 'xdm'. If none are present, you don't have a gui. If they give you error messages, those should give you a hint; otherwise, post them here.

Jonas

personal POV: use debian/testing instead of /stable. It doesn't come collapsing down on you, so don't worry

Interesting!

I ran "startx" and it came up with a hash-like screen with three(3) separate windows on it - two labeled 'x-term' and one labeled 'login' ..... now what? It looks like my monitor is going flat out in a 1280x1024 mode - how can I change this? There doesn't appear to be any color - just various gray-scales.

Thanks so far

try typing 'apt-get install synaptic' in the xterm as root. iirc, synaptic (which is a gui frontend to apt) requires gnome, so apt-get should automatically download it too (after asking you). Also, try 'apt-get install gnome-desktop-environment'

Wonderful!

It is called "floppy" - and I was able to mount and look at the files on it Thanks.

Incidently, what I did was to "gunzip -c README.gz>/dev/fd0".
This caused some floppy activity but when I tried to read the floppy on my windows box, it (windows) balked. Should I have included the file-name 'README.gz' after the re-direct?

/dev/fd0 isn't just like a folder, it represents the entire floppy, including file system information. It's very likely that you overwrote some part of that, thus rendering the data useless (unless you got a raw data extractor for windows).

The 'real way' to do what you want is like this:
$ su
(do your thing)
$ mkdir /floppy
$ mount /dev/fd0 /floppy
$ cp some.tar.gz /floppy
$ umount /floppy
(now you can remove the disk, and it should all work just fine

Thanks all for the inputs

I was able to read my floppy file in Windows and I now have xwindows to some degree. I would like to know how to re-configure xwindows. All that happens when I "XFree86 -configure" is it does a bunch of something, reports back that I have no mouse and says I should edit a file - doesn't say what file - then dumps me back at the command line.

Running "startx" puts me in xwindows WITH a mouse but in gray-scale and 1280 x 1024 mode. I would like color and a different resolution.........

dpkg-reconfigure x-server-xfree86

sorry, it's 'xserver-xfree86'

One last point you probably know already. Before ejecting the floppy, you need to unmount it so that everything is written from the cache.

Thx Jonas

I did a "dpkg -reconfigure xserver-xfree86" ....and got a

So I checked dpkg's commands - nothing about 'reconfigure'

Subsequently, I did a "dpkg -iEG xserver-xfree86" .....and got "No such file or directory"

Did a search for "xserver" & found two(2)ea. 'xserver' directories - neither had a file by the name of "xfree86"

Did a search for "xfree86" ..... again, no such file or directory.

Visited "www.Xfree.org" but could find no package (or file) by the name of "xfree86"

Originally, when I downloaded the file from "www.XFree.org" it never mentioned anything about downloading companion files.

Any suggestions?

my bad, I did as misspelling. it's:

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86