Debian Disk, Audio and Other Problems Solved

So, I reinstalled Debian today and everything looked fine but it wasn't. I couldn't access my removable drive and the sound wasn't working. All very strange because they worked perfectly last time I installed it.

Eventually I tracked down the problem. When I created the user account james I didn't add any groups to it. Debian uses groups to grant permission to various essential things. To fix all my problems here are the commands I ran as root:

adduser james plugdev
adduser james src
adduser james dialout
adduser james adm
adduser james floppy
adduser james disk
adduser james video
adduser james cdrom
adduser james audio

This sorted everything out and made all the experimenting I'd been doing with alsa and my fstab rather pointless!

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