xterm and shell behaviors

["Thomas J. Hamman" <hawk3@eagnet.com>]

I'm a new convert to Debian, and I need a little help changing a few behaviors of xterm and the shell (bash).

1.  When I press tab to autocomplete something in the command line, and there are more than one possible autocompletion, the shell BEEPS.  This is very annoying, especially when my gf is asleep within ten feet of my computer. :)  How can I disable this?

2.  I like my xterms to have a black background and gray text, like the console; how can I make this the default setting?  (I know how to do it with command line options, but I want it to be default.)  I noticed there are commented lines for such settings in /etc/X11/Xresources/xterm, but uncommenting those lines seems to have no effect.

3.  The delete key seems to function the same as the backspace key in xterm; how can I change it to delete the character in _front_ of the cursor instead?

Any help will be appreciated.  I'm enjoying Debian, it's much better than the other distros I've tried. :)

Tom