gnome desktop/sony minidisk player
 

i have redhat 9, and i am using gnome. i used apt-get to update the system and everything was woriking great until i logged in under my username and nothing came up but boxes with large red "x" in them. i could not see anything but the normal color of the desktop and empty boxes. however when i log in as root everything works fine. i created another user and it worked fine as well, but i would like to fix my original username with the settings i had?

also i have a sony minidisk player with a built in recorder, when i plug it in, i use the system hardware application and it shows up, the system sees the device and know what it is, but is says driver unknown? is there a module patch i need to install? what a GUI graphical program to copy music to it? any help would be appreciated.

one more question i have is about the nvidia drivers? i have no problem installing the drivers, but when i use them it cuts off about a 1/4 inch on the right side of my screen, i dont play any games, so i am running the redhat nvidia driver, it works fine, but i was wondering if the nvidia drivers did more for your computer other than gaming?

toshiba satillite 5105-s501
p4 1.7
512 ram
dvd/cdrw
redhat 9

Thats a lotta questions, but here's a go
 

first a really drastic way to reset your gnome settings is to login to your account on a text console, or login as root and cd to your home directory

if as root, then remove all gnome dotfiles (.gnome*) this will delete all the old settings and allow you to relog in and get it all back... or to get a text console hit

<ctl><alt>F1
or any Fkey up to F6... these are virtual consoles and you can login in a text mode and do the same removal of all .gnome files the command would be

rm -rf .gnome*

this is fairly destructive so make sure you want to do this... but when you relogin in Xwindows you should be set back to the default gnome setup...

by the way to go back to Xwindows after the above trick for the virtual console, use

<ctl><alt>F7 to go back to Xwindows

next for the sony minidisc player, it may be recognized as a mass storage device, but it really depends... if you do the following in a terminal window as root, I can at least give you an idea, but remember, this could be destructive to your media, or even your hardware, (but most likely not)

first, do not have the device plugged in...

get the terminal window open and change to root (if youre not logged in as root already) with the command

su -

and then type in the root password.

Then do a

tail -f /var/log/messages

and after that plugin the device... and copy and paste the lines related to your device into a reply here... If you want to try and make it work with the usb mass storage driver I can give you the means to do so, but it may not be the perfectly designed driver for that piece of hardware... to get out of the tail -f /var/log/messages just hit <ctl>c

anyway a more direct email correspondence about this issue may work better, fire one off if you want

If you download the most recent Nvidia drivers... 4496 I think, then you can give it a try again, most often an issue with strange video viewing is that the Modeline for that laptop's display is set wrong... you'd have to try to figure out for sure the correct Horizontal and vertical sync rates and clock frequencies...

i.e. 1024x768@75Hz or whatever you know works on the laptop in windows...

that can be tricky though... make sure you remember the settings that work already...

Phil

phil at daviszone.org

I am using red hat 7.3 with a 2.4.22 kernel.with USB support complied in. I have a USB 2 hub hooked up. and yes it is a Net mD model . Is there a loadable module foer this device by chance? (by the way forgive me if I am talking out of my butt :-)