Questions about Debian 2.0

[Remo.Badii@psi.ch (Remo Badii)]

Dear Debian users/developers,

I have a few questions which arised during my (successful) installation of
Debian 2.0 on a Thinkpad 760 CD. Please consider that this is my first Linux
installation at all and have mercy.

1)  When trying mtools from my personal account, I get the error message
    "cannot open /dev/fd0
    permission denied
    cannot initialize A:"
    Adding /dev/fd0 in /etc/fstab with user,noauto does not help (and it
    should not). I have the system-made /etc/mtools.conf in which I just
    commented out the line with the SCSI disk and uncommented the one
    with the IDE disk (c: /dev/hda1 , where dos resides). None of this
    changes the situation.
    Do I have to change privileges somewhere?
2)  When pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL (programmed to halt the system in inittab),
    the machine halts but is not powered off. Is this because I have not
    chosen the APM package during installation (overlooked it, probably)?
    Do I solve the problem by going into dselect and installing that
    package?
3)  Just after running XF86Setup, I noticed a file /use/X11R6/bin/X: is that
    a copy of XF86_VGA16?
    Later, I renamed it to Xold (probably I could have deleted it), created
    a file X and linked it to /usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_SVGA. As a matter of fact,
    X works. Is the above correct?
4)  In XF86Setup, I chose a mouse sample rate of 0 (since I did not see any
    effect in changing it): what is this rate?
5)  Is there no dos2unix in the distribution?
6)  Keyboard in X: in a previous XFree release, there was a en_GB keymap to
    be declared in XF86Config (I have a UK keyboard). What is the present
    version's replacement for that?
7)  While installing ppp, I got the warning that serial.o (whatever it is)
    should have been installed manually later. During boot there is a
    message about a serial module being manually loaded. Is that the same
    thing?
8)  tgif and pgplot (both non-free, graphics and libraries, respectively)
    where not on my CDs (official 2-CD set from Christian Schwarz). Is
    this usual? Should I load them via FTP using dselect?
9)  Seyon suggests kermit, which is not in the distribution (orphaned
    package ckermit). What can be done?

Thank you for your help.
Once I have configured everything, I'll post my experience in a detailed way
to the relevant WWW pages.

Remo
 ________________________________________________________
| Dr. Remo Badii             | Paul Scherrer Institute   |
| Nonlinear Dynamics and     | 5232 Villigen PSI         |
| Stochastic Processes Group | Switzerland               |
|____________________________|___________________________|
| badii "at" psi.ch          | http://www1.psi.ch/~badii |
|____________________________|___________________________|