Several issues - related to each other maybe?

[Rune]

Decided to give debian another go yesterday, the first time I tried it the nvidia drivers for my card absolutely refused to work

They went in fine this time so I thought 'yay! I'm in business'

First problem I then found was only being able to even read directories on ntfs partitions as root. All my ntfs partitions are added in fstab as rw with the group set as users

I've tried chmod and chown with no luck, as well as changing the permissions via the gui as root

(chmod and chown report them as being read-only even though fstab is set mount them with read, write and exec permissions ... at least I think it is)

How the hell can I change the ownership of directories!



Decided to leave that issue for the moment and get vmware installed, which is an essential package to install for me, if I can't get vmware to run in a distro then I pretty much can't use that distro on my main machine

When trying to install vmware using the perl install script from the vmware tar I get these errors:

./vmware-install.pl: line 8: use: command not found
./vmware-install.pl: line 13: use: command not found
./vmware-install.pl: line 16: my: command not found
./vmware-install.pl: line 18: my: command not found
./vmware-install.pl: line 21: use: command not found
./vmware-install.pl: line 26: sub: command not found
./vmware-install.pl: line 27: syntax error near unexpected token `eq'
./vmware-install.pl: line 27: ` if (vmware_product() eq 'tools-for-solaris') {'


My first thought was 'is perl even installlled?' and yes it does appear to be correctly installed

Ok I thought, let's try the rpm converted to a .deb with alien, and got these following errors when trying the conversion:

dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: could not find any packages for libX11.so.6
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: unable to find dependency information for shared l ibrary libX11 (soname 6, path libX11.so.6, dependency field Depends)
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: could not find any packages for libXtst.so.6
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: unable to find dependency information for shared l ibrary libXtst (soname 6, path libXtst.so.6, dependency field Depends)
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: could not find any packages for libXext.so.6
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: unable to find dependency information for shared l ibrary libXext (soname 6, path libXext.so.6, dependency field Depends)
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: could not find any packages for libz.so.1
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: unable to find dependency information for shared l ibrary libz (soname 1, path libz.so.1, dependency field Depends)
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: could not find any packages for libtiff.so.3
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: unable to find dependency information for shared l ibrary libtiff (soname 3, path libtiff.so.3, dependency field Depends)
dh_gencontrol
dpkg-gencontrol: error: current build architecture amd64 does not appear in pack age's list (i386)
dh_gencontrol: command returned error code 65280
make: *** [binary-arch] Error 1
find: VMwareWorkstation-6.0.0: No such file or directory


As far as I can see I have everything alien depends on, rpm, dpkg, dpkg-dev, debhelper, gcc and make

I wondered about this line: dpkg-gencontrol: error: current build architecture amd64 does not appear in pack age's list (i386), it definitely is the x86_64 version I was trying to convert (and it's the version of debian I'm running)


The line find: VMwareWorkstation-6.0.0: No such file or directory is probably just there because of all the other errors, it actually does create that dir and populates it with some subdirs and files

All the other errors (which were repeated umpteen times btw even tho I've only pasted each once), I looked at the packages it was throwing up the dependency errors for and I do have them all, except for libz which I couldn't find (lots of stuff beginning with libz though)


I'm unsure which I'd be most likely to successfully 'fix', installing directly from vmware's perl installer or converting the rpm to a .deb

The whole vmware thing's annoying me as I really want to give debian a fair go, it certainly seems considerably quicker than opensuse which I was running up until yesterday


Rune

[Rune]

Just tried the rpm using kpackage and got this, dunno if this throws any light on it or not

</VMware-workstation-6.0.0-45731.x86_64.rpm';echo RESULT=$?
error: Failed dependencies:
/bin/sh is needed by VMwareWorkstation-6.0.0-45731.i386
RESULT=1


/bin/sh I'm guessing relates to permissions?

Although it's saying .i386 needs them when I'm trying to install x86_64


As for the permissions on the ntfs drives, someone on another forum suggested debian will only mount ntfs as ro unless one uses a third-party type tool


Which prompted me to remember having used one called ntfs-3g in the past so my next move is to look that up and give it a go

[Rune]

Tried ntfs-3g

Wading through all the things that needed newer versions than debian has even after apt-get update etc etc, I came to this one

libfuse2 depends on libc6 (>= 2.6-1)

Which isn't available for amd64 as far as I can see

So scratch that idea

The ntfs issue isn't THAT much of a problem really, a bit of a pain yes, but not critical

I might try putting a shortcut to a script that launches konqueror as root on my panel or something

If I can figure out how to do stuff like that in linux of course lol

Have a folder on quick launch with shortcuts to batch files for allsorts of little activities I've done in windows, not worked out how to do something like that for the little scripts I've started doing in linux as yet

Main issue with the ntfs access thing is not being able to share certain folders between an xp I'm not ready to ditch just yet, and linux in the way I'd prefer, mail profiles etc, but I can work around that


The REAL bugbear for me with debian is getting vmware to work, or even something like virtualbox, but I can't get that working either

Basically, there are certain windows apps I'll probably always need access to and I don't wanna have to reboot into xp to use them, and without wanting to offend anyone, I find wine crap

I've got a nice little xp vm I've made with just about everything except what it needs to boot and run the few programs I requireit for either removed or disabled

Only uses just over 40 megs of memory to boot up so yeah it's dead basic, but it does what I need it for, and I need to boot into it inside debian if I'm to keep debian (or something like it made in some program other than vmware if need be)

Much about Debian and it's philosophy impresses me and I don't wanna ditch it if the issue of running a vm is workable

[Rune]

I followed someone's advice on another forum and tried upgrading to Lenny

That failed and killed X

Fixed X and found it's caused allsorts of other problems that I'm not gonna even begin to try fixing

Think I'll go back to opensuse, not as fast as debian but at least I can get everything working in it without wasting hours on end in the process

Anyway, thanks for the help (help? what help?)

Might try again when I've got a few days spare using the dvd rather than the minimal netinst cd, wasted more time than I can afford on it for the moment

Rune