Just installed Essential Debian at work as an experiment: fairly pleased with a minimal Debian on one disk (we already have Debian machines running Slink) BUT
The permissions on /tmp may be wrong. As root/super user all is OK. Can't use vi or man as a normal user because there is no permission to write files in /tmp On the systems installed from a two disk set: /tmp has permissions of root root drwxrwxrwt (1777) On ED /tmp has permissions of 755 so nothing can write temp files. Solution: chmod 1777 /tmp Note: some people may regard this as a security problem because the directory is world readable/writeable but the sticky bit means that writes should be append only AFAIK. Hope this helps somebody Andy
