A Million Questions
 

I just installed Slackware 10.0, and I have a bunch of questions about getting everything set up right. I guess I'll just jump right in:

1: How do I get my USB mouse to work in X? I'm using a laptop with a touchpad and a USB optical wheel mouse. The touchpad works fine, and the USB mouse is detected and powered on at startup, but does not do anything when I'm using GNOME.

EDIT: Got the mouse working, hooray! Nobody has any suggestions for the rest though? :(

2: How can I change the permissions of my windows partition? During the Slackware install, I set it up to be mounted at boot, and it works fine for root, but I want to let other users read from it. However, I get an error about it being read only when I try to chmod. I got rid of the read only flag in /etc/fstab, so it looks like this:

/dev/hda1 /win-c ntfs defaults 1 1

I really had no idea what I was doing though... Any pointers would be great.

3: How can I get the KDE programs to show up in my applications menu under GNOME? I really like GNOME, and I also really like the gigantic software collection KDE has. Surely there is a way to launch those from GNOME.

4: What the hell is darkstar? Nevermind, figured that one out on my own :)

Well, that's all I can think of right now. I'm sure there are more that I have forgotten, and they will surely be added soon :) Thanks in advance for any help that you guys can give!

Okay, here's the next one:

5: How can I make java .jar's run from GNOME?

6: Why does only root have "shut down" and "reboot" options listed in the logoff menu?

Try going into the Login Manager under the Sessions tab and for console, select Everybody under "Allow Shutdown".

Sorry I don't have suggestions for more, but I hope that much helps.

here is my fstab entry for the win partition

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat auto,rw,umask=000 1 0

You'll notice that for my Windows partition, umask=000. This makes it so that my regular users can use the partition

and check this site out to help u setup slack easily
http://shilo.is-a-geek.com/slack/

I changed mine to umask=222, because I want it to be read only, but it still shows up as 500. I gave /win-c and /dev/hda1 both permissions of 777. This is truely perplexing me.

Thanks for the link! That website looks like it will be very helpful.

yeah it helped me setup my slack easily and now everything is working gr8

Okay, I've gotten most of those issues resolved. I have a few more questions that I am going to post in here just to avoid making excessive numbers of threads.

Is it possible to make the GNOME file browser open each folder in the same window instead of creating a new window each time I open a folder?

Is there any way to repartition my hard drive without having to reformat and losing everything? (I want to strip Windows down to just what it needs and give most of the HD to Linux)

Can I make the GNOME file browser automatically refresh when changes are made?

Go to Applications > (Desktop) Preferences > Configuration Editor. Hunt around in there until you find something that says "always use web browser" or similar. Change the value to 1.

There is Partition Magic and other software programs for windows that will allow you to resize the partition, but I don't recommend them as I've never had success with them. If your brave, I guess you can give them a try. I also believe there is some dos programs that do it to. Good luck :)

<edit>
I guess another way, would be to make an image file (with norton ghost, etc...) of your windows partition and then repartition and then restore the image
</edit>

You can use Parted. It comes with a Knoppix CD as QTParted.

So will I have to create a Knoppix boot disk and run it from there?

edit: It looks like Parted doesn't support NTFS, so that won't work for me.