Chances of getting Debian working on my old laptop are getting steadily dimmer, so I'm concentrating on the working system on my desktop, though it's more of a problem to bring to clinics. Rather than get answers at clinics to try out at home, I've got a bunch of questions to ask here. Anyway I think I'm better at using information in print. In case you wonder, I'm avoiding GUIs.
I know, RTFM, if only they were readable by novices (including info and help files). I'm working on my own version, hopefully to be finished before I forget how to speak Novicese. Maybe most important, I don't have Linux email working yet. Lynx works fine. But I guess I don't understand the relationship between Mutt and Fetchmail/Sendmail. Mut says "No mailbox". I gather I'm supposed to create on under /var/spool/mail. How is that done? I still can't mount a floppy. .fstab says "/dev/fd0 /floppy auto defaults,user,noauto 0 0". But mount says "mount: can't find floppy in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab". A similar statement for CD works fine. What am I missing? No, let me change that. What do I need to do? I added the line to .fstab, "/dev/sda1 /dos msdos auto defaults,user,noauto 0 0" with similar results. I like the potential for AE (editor) and the MC editor because they're straightforward, AE starts off with a help box and they both have options for macros, which I always like. But AE apparently isn't designed to word wrap or print. Are there possibilities? The MC editor apparently doen't print either. MC editor has manual paragraph reformatting. Its Options-General menu has an option for "Dynamic paragraphing" but I can't find a way to change it from "No wrap", or make other changes. The lpr command prints, but with only LF, not CR. What needs to be changed so the printer recognizes the Linux format? MC mentiones spell checking, but it says "Error trying to staf files". Ispell works for root, but not for normal users it says "Can't create /tmp/ispell0tlbVC Lately man has started saying "man: can't create temp filename: Permission denied". As root, I'm wondering who denied permission and why. Is God interfering here? I thought I was God of this system. As a normal user I have .alias and .bashrc, both with aliases. Is there a reason? Is there some place I can put one such file that will work for all users? The places I've tried haven't seemed to work. Can I make changes and have them recognized without rebooting? I'd like to write "c [directory]" to obey alias c='cd [??] |ls'. What is it that's needed here? Someone (Jason?) showed me it worked anyway, but now I think he left out the [directory] part. How about changing (slowing) keyboard repeat or "typematic" rate? Don't be too sure about this. "Experts" have tried. The DOS/Windows repeat rate is fine, or maybe a bit too slow. In LS, Less or More (pagers) apparently prevent color format. Is there a way around that? What's the sense of having LS (or file readers I've seen) without a pager anyway? What does it take to change commands/program filenames without causing problems? For instance I might change Less to Show, or Display, with alias d='display'. Dan Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Eugene OR 97401 http://www.efn.org/~danrob/ Nobody's perfect; everybody's approaching optimum.
