Originally Posted by Excalibur

1) Your NIC card may be a RTL8139 based card and the system is attempting to load the driver. However, there are two drivers available. 8139cp and 8139too The first is usually the 8139cp and it appears to be failing, however, the 8139too may be loading. You can check this by using the lsmod command to list the loaded modules. If 8139too is loaded then you can fairly safely assume the errors can be ignored.

2) If you are logged in as a normal user and want to mount a data CD then you need to add the "user" or "users" option in the /etc/fstab file to allow a user to mount the CD. The line should look like;

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 users,noauto,ro 0 0

Also, an audio CD cannot be mounted like a data CD. So you will not be able to "see or view" the tracks in the directory tree of any mount point. If you wish to just play an audio CD then try "kscd". If you wish to play, rip, mp3 encode, catalog, etc. then search for a program called "grip". Google should turn up a location.

3) When a FAT16(32) partition type is mounted, the mount command changes the permissions on the directory according to the default umask setting in /etc/profile which is 022. This setting equats to a 755 (rwxr-xr-x). I believe this is because the file system types do not have their own permision settings so it will inherit the mount point permision on all files. If you desire to mount the partitions to allow all users write permission then mount it with the option of umask=000. This will equate to a 777 (rwxrwxrwx). So an fstab entry would look like below;

/dev/hda1 /windows/c vfat umask=000 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /windows/d vfat umask=000 0 0

If your system has some other options then simply add them together using the comma as a separator.

4) Hard disks are identified by the hdx or sdx type device name. The partitons are the disk device name with a partition number added. So that /dev/hda is the first IDE hard disk and /dev/hda1 is the first IDE hard partition number one. The device /dev/hda cannot be directly mounted because it is not a partition. There are operations that can be done on the disk device name but they are few. For instance when you want to create partitions you always use the disk device name and never the partiton number. So the use of these device names are context sensitive as well.

5) On the /dev/cdrom link. It is just a symlink. Normally all symlinks are by default set with full permisisons allowed. It is the real device name that many times must have the permisions changed. For example; if the device /dev/cdrom points to /dev/scd0 then change the permisions on /dev/scd0. Since normally only root can mount/umount hard disk partitions, it doesn't seem to make much sense to attempt to change permissions on the device name. But then again I have never had a need to either. It would be better to just specify them in the /etc/fstab and let the system mount them when you boot. Then use the "users" option on removable media like a cdrom drive.

Sorry, I do not know anything about themes or blackbox and stuff like that. I am not one for eye candy so I just leave it the way it is unless it is obtrusive to the use of the system.

Hope the info above will at least help in the other areas that I think you were asking about.