[NTLUG:Discuss] Can you tell I'm a newbie?

[Wayne Dahl]

Hello again,

I appreciate the help with the C program...the book didn't make clear
what I was supposed to be linking and gave an example of linking a
program with library files, etc.  I now understand what he was trying to
get at, but the book could have been a little clearer about what I was
doing and why, especially with the example program it had me write. 
Makes me wonder what else I'm going to come up against in the book that
won't be clear that I won't get because I've never done this before.

Now, I have two other problems.  The first started when I copied a few
.wav files to /usr/share/sounds from a floppy using Nautilus logged in
as root.  The files copied ok and I clicked on each one to make sure
they worked.  I clicked on the third one and the machine locked up.  The
only way I could get out of it was to reboot the machine.  Now, this is
RH 7.3 using an ext3 fs so I wasn't too worried about losing anything. 
But, when I rebooted and the filesystem was coming up, I got a message
that 2 orphaned inodes had been deleted and when the system came
completely up, the event sounds no longer worked.  The sound card is ok
because I can start Sound Recorder and play any of those .wav files in
that directory, including the event sounds that used to play when a
window was opened, closed, etc.  I'm running Gnome/sawfish as the
desktop manager and have checked to make sure the Sound server is turned
on.  It appears everything is set up, but there is just no sound on the
events, even though there are sounds associated with the events.  I'm
not sure where else to go to look for a solution to this...have checked
the search engines and haven't found anything mentioning this particular
problem.

In the course of trying to fix that problem, I've made things worse with
my normal user environment.  As I was attempting to find SOME other
setting I might have missed, I switched from Gnome/sawfish to Gnome/twm
as the desktop manager and had a heck of a time trying to get back to
sawfish.  The panel at the bottom of the screen disappeared and so did
my desktop icons.  When I finally did get back to sawfish, my desktop
icons were still gone and now I appear to be locked out of making
changes to the desktop.  I can pull up the Start Here menu from
Nautilus, but it shows to not have permissions to change/add icons to
the desktop using drag and drop like I did before.  The other user
account I have set up for my wife seems to be ok and the root account
works just fine also, so it's something I've done to my normal user
account.  The kicker is, I don't remember changing any permissions on
anything, so I'm at a loss as to how this happened.  I've come to the
conclusion that the easiest thing to do might be to copy the
subdirectories under my home account that have to do with mail settings,
etc, and blow away the account and start over with a new one and restore
those subdirectories, but before I did that, I thought I'd get your
input as to how I might fix this without having to go to that extreme. 
If I have to do that, I have to do that and I'm prepared to do so if
necessary.  But, if this is something I can fix without having to start
all over again, I want to learn it.  I don't want to get into the mode
of thinking that the best way or easiest way to fix something is to
delete it and start over.

Again, I thank you in advance for your input.  You people are going to
get tired of hearing from me, I think!  Just remember, infinite patience
is a virtue. ;)

Wayne