More problems becoming a 'normal' user

["Rich Harran." <95rmwh@eng.cam.ac.uk>]

I emailed a problem on the list yesterday, about getting to use X as a
normal user.  The problem was the permissions of /dev/null, which I
changed to: 
	crw-rw-rw-   1 root  root   
and everything worked.  However, when I restarted today, I had the same
problem, and found that the permissions had changed back.  I'm using X
now, as I've changed them again, but how do I stop them changing back when
I restart?  ... Ok, I restarted again, and this time the permissions
didn't change back, so I guess that's solved (bit wierd though!).

Also, I want to be able to read-write automatically mounted dos drives as
a normal user in group 'dos' (I read this was the right way to approach
it in this list a while ago). I created the group, and added user 'rich'
to it, but I can't change the group of the directory /mnt (my dos drive),
to 'dos'.

The drive is mounted with the line:

	/dev/hda1      /mnt    vfat     defaults     0  0

To what should I change this?  I've tried changing the options column to
	defaults,gid=dos
but then the drive refuses to mount (BTW how do I view the startup
messages after they've whizzed off the top of the screen?).

Sorry I crammed so many silly questions into one posting.
Thanks in advance

Rich