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Making the Switch-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems

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zridling:
After you've installed your distro, take the time to walk through the various user guides offered online. They will provide an installation guide, a complete tour of the desktop, along with how to manage software installation and upgrades to help get started. I had to go back to square one when I realized that there were too many subtle differences I wasn't understanding. A user guide helped me understand that ALT+Tab can manage separate desktops (if you setup more than one), for instance, rather than merely switching among open apps.

Some things in GNU/Linux are surprisingly simple. No, really. Take DVD burning. This is all there is:

* Open a Nautilus window, such as Home or Computer. (Nautilus is the file manager.)

* Select Places > CD/DVD Creator.

* Drag and drop the files you wish to burn into this new empty window.

* Click Write to Disc.

* In the dialog box, you can change the name of the disc and the write speed if they are incorrect.

* Click Write.
And holy crap, it works. Same for my USB flash drive. Even though it was "Vista certified," it would only work in Vista if you applied a low-level format utility in XP! And then Vista wanted to reformat it every single time you inserted it. Under Fedora 7, it was recognized, and "mounted" on the desktop for me to open, copy, delete files to and from. Again, I'm surprised by that because of all things, I figured DVD burning and USB drives would be difficult. Similarly, playing audio files are not difficult either. Here's what the Fedora 7 user guide had to say:

                 Fedora includes complete support for many freely-distributable formats. These are the Ogg media format, Vorbis audio, Theora video, Speex
                 audio, and FLAC audio formats. These freely-distributable formats are not encumbered by patent or license restrictions. They provide powerful
                 and flexible alternatives to more popular, restricted formats such as MP3.

Ogg is a nice, high-quality format, but I'm not converting 40Gb of MP3 files, especially since the MP3 patent expires in 2011. Not a problem. That's fixed by merely downloading the LAME encoder. GNU/Linux supports every audio format except for WMA, which is only partially supported.



Another difficulty is that I have two HDs on this GNU/Linux system, and formatted both of them as ext3 drives during setup. However, the second HD is not "mounted." More reading. Spent an entire night looking for a solution, but the two I did find didn't work for me. Hmmm. Here's what I tried:


* Make a mount point, mkdir /media/seconddrive, then mount it, mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/seconddrive. You should now see your drive available in Nautilus. If this doesn't work then post the output of fdisk -l

* Command wise, it is like above. sdxx refers to the device and partition, eg, sdb1 (sd = some device, b = second hd, 1 = first partition). '-t type' refers to the filesystem type, usually found automatically but on occasion it isnt, eg, ext3, ext2, ntfs, vfat (fat32), msdos (fat16).

* mount -t type /dev/sdxx /mount/point

* With the exception of loopback devices (iso's, encrypted file systems, etc), which are mounted like so.

* mount -t type /file /mount/point -o loop

*
I'm not embarrassed to say I didn't understand a single word of the above commands, and I overheated my tiny dinosaur brain. More reading, I'll get there. I remember the similar DOS commands, but this is another animal. Meanwhile, I took time out to install Mac OS X in a VM and jeez, I still don't like OS X. It must be me; I still wonder why everyone goes ga-ga over it.

[UPDATE]: Turns out this was not a "problem" after all. The installation did format both my drives, but unlike Windows, GNU/Linux combines all drive space into its filesystem model. Thus, both my drives appeared to combine as one. However, when I disconnected the d-drive and rebooted, the OS still worked without a hitch. Cool! The lesson I learned is that the layout of the Linux filesystem is a different model than we know in Windows. Mayank Sarup does the best job of outlining it. This may be one of the hardest things to wrap my mind around. In Windows we have a "file manager" that manages files on different media — HDs, floppies, CD/DVD, old ZIP drives, network drives, FTP, and so on — CLICK-n-DRAG. And while you can manage your files on GNU/Linux this way, it's not efficient for that platform, since it follows Unix hierarchy. Instead, files in Linux, even executables, are fluid and mobile. Once again, GNU/Linux is not wrong, just different.

________________________________________________
Part-01: My journey from Windows to Linux
Part-02: Which Linux distro to choose?
Part-03: First impressions and first problems after installation
Part-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems
Part-05: Ten Great Ideas of GNU/Linux
Part-06: Software Management is not that different

Tonurics:
Hard drives in linux are quite a bit different that what we are used to from windows. One of the big things that most people don't pick up on (especially when dealing with two hard drives) is that you are not locked into only mounting your hard drive at a fixed location (in windows, your stuck using a drive letter) you can mount your drive anywhere you want; for example you could mount your second drive at /home (think of /home like the windows profile folders, inside you have your desktop folder, my documents, my music, etc) which would make your system save all your personal data on the second drive, leaving your root drive (first hard drive, which has the os installed on it) untouched. This all happens transparently so if you removed your second hard drive and put it in another linux computer (and mounted /home there) all your files would travel with you, your original would also continue to work as /home would default back to the root drive.

Anyways, hopefully that is enough back-story to give you a better understanding on linux hard drives. Now for mounting your disk.

Firstly using /dev/[device] seems to be slowly going the way of the dodo (not that it wont work) but there is a good chance a kernel update to your system later on will break your mount points. Also the /dev/[device] links are pretty organic, you may plug in a new hard drive later and find all your device numbers has shifted (/dev/sda could become /dev/sdb etc.). But there is a simple fix:

In a shell run: ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

You should see something like:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-06-14 08:23 34hj34h-34jhg-434h-8345-k3h434k5hkjh -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-06-14 08:23 s7d7sd7-76s75-34k5-k34h-k3j4h5k3j4h5 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  9 2007-06-14 08:23 s78ds67-sd635-34kj-34k5-sfb23478623c -> ../../sdb

The above command shows you all the Universally Unique Identifiers for your detected hard disks and partitions. (You can also visit the directory: cd /dev/disk/ to find other disk identification information, such as cable location and serial number.) Assuming that your second hard drive is sdb1, you'll want to use: /dev/disk/by-uuid/s7d7sd7-76s75-34k5-k34h-k3j4h5k3j4h5 going forward when creating mount points.

Now is a good time to decide where you want to mount your disk, the above solution told you /media/seconddrive that will work, but personally I think it makes much more sense to mount it in the actual mount directory: /mnt/ Of course I could be just talking crazy (you _can_ mount anywhere you want); KDE on the other hand will do all kinds of nice auto icon creation and such if you use /mnt/ so thats what I recommend (yes, I know you are using gnome; you made baby Jesus cry).

To make the folder you will be mounting type this in the shell: sudo mkdir /mnt/seconddrive

It will ask you for your root password (sudo = super do) and create the new empty folder at /mnt/seconddrive of course you can change "seconddrive" to be anything you want.

Next to tell the system to use the folder as a mount point: sudo mount /dev/disk/by-uuid/s7d7sd7-76s75-34k5-k34h-k3j4h5k3j4h5 /mnt/seconddrive

Replace the UUID from your own system, you should not have to give the type like in the above solution the mount command _should_ auto detect it. Now you should be able to go to /mnt/seconddrive in your favorite  file explorer and be using your second hard drive, a quick left click to compare free space between /mnt/seconddrive and /mnt/ can be used to verify your other drive is in use. If gnome doesn't make you nice drive icons, you can create links to /mnt/seconddrive on your desktop (left click drag drop).

To un-mount your hard drive use: sudo umount /mnt/seconddrive

If you turn off your computer, the drive will be un-mounted automatically, to make it permanent you need to edit /etc/fstab with a text editor as root. You should probably make sure the above worked before doing that... Since I am lazy, and you can probably figure out the rest by using the above info and googling fstab I leave you there.

*rant* If you are a window user, you should have went with KDE; gnome is more geared towards mac users. The gnome ideology seams to be "it's easier because you have limited options"; like how one button mouses are suppose to be easier than two button mouses.

Darwin:
My Neanderthal brain is starting to caramelize nicely as well... I'd better get reading too!

zridling:
Tonurics, thanks, and yes, naturally I like KDE better, but thought I'd learn something new with gnome. I'm off to try.

Gothi[c]:
To automatically mount your second drive on boot, and/or have it accessible by users other than root, you can add a line to your /etc/fstab file

(to edit /etc/fstab as the root user you can enter a command like:

--- ---sudo gedit /etc/fstab
)

Add following lines for an additional ext3 drive and an additional ntfs drive, for example:


--- ---/dev/sdb1   /media/seconddrive ext3    uid=500,gid=500,user    0 0
/dev/sdc1   /media/windowsdrive ntfs    uid=500,gid=500,user   0 0

Adding these lines also lets you use 'shortcut' mount commands like:
  mount /media/seconddrive
or
  mount /media/windowsdrive

Remember the mount points (the directories in the /media folder) need to exist, and if they don't exist they need to be created (as described in previous posts).

Also remember to change /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdc1 respectively with your hd and partition, you can find out the correct names by using the methods described in previous posts.

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