Christopher Sawtell wrote:
On Mon, 30 May 2005 14:59, Deane Foreman wrote:
KDE presents my drives in much the same way as Windows - although I
assume on KDE this does not extend any deeper than the level of the
interface itself?
Correct, the KDE developers have tried to keep close to a paradigm with which
everybody is familiar.
I easily fall into the trap of thinking that what is familiar and
habitual is also intuitive. My experience with KDE was my first
experience with Linux and so when I tried the Gnome interface I was
frozen within my habits.
In so doing they have sacrificed some of the
flexability for which UNIX is famous. In the case of CDs and other drives
they have used the /mnt directory to hold the so-called mount points for the
extra drives and such like.
When you click on the CDs drive's icon on the desk-top kde executes the
command:-
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
for you. This mount command splices the contents of the cdrom into the
file-system tree at the position /mnt/cdrom. This action is only a
convention. It would - for example - be quite possible to mount the CDROM so
it becomes accessable directly from within your home directory.
Do you mean that KDE does *not* allow the cdrom to be mounted to be
accessible from within the home directory and that is the kind of
flexibility which is sacrificed?
http://www.icon.co.za/~psheer/book/node21.html.gz
http://www.icon.co.za/~psheer/book/node22.html.gz
are a faily good text-book explanation of what's going on, but these chapters
do assume that you have a vague understanding of what's going on.
I will need to try jumping around a bit in the Rute book I think. I had
a quick look at those links and while I do not think I will take all of
it in I think it will help to fill in some blank spaces.
Cheers
Deane
