mgh;202523 Wrote:
> I have heard the term "mount" the drive, though I do not know what that
> means. I can open the simpledrive (USB external HHD), navigate through
> it, and play FLAC files that are stored on the drive.
In Windows, you have the old "c:" drive, then other drives with similar
letters (remember how floppies always were "a:" drives?)
Linux is much more flexible than that. It really doesn't care which
drives go where, nor is letting you know a big priority - because most
of the time you really don't. If Ubuntu was allowed to use all those
partitions you have, it would probably have mingled them all up into
your root "/" or your /home folder. It didn't because you probably had
existing data on these partitions or they were NTFS formatted. You
actually have to look through the df command, fstab and the System
Monitor to discover which folders the drives are connected to, i.e.
their "mount point".
Mounting a drive tells the OS where to place it in your combined
filesystem. This can be convenient because the end result is so
seamless - for example, I have a 250 GB drive for music. In Windows it
was a separate drive with a separate drive letter. In Linux I mounted
it to "/home/music". This can also be confusing if you don't know
what's going on, but I did this specifically in /etc/fstab:
Code:
--------------------
/dev/hdb2 /home/music ext3 defaults 0 2
--------------------
With external drives, there is an automount program (autofs?) that will
mount drives on-the-fly, outside of what fstab controls. It puts
external drives in /media and mounts them to a folder with the same
name as the volume name - in your case, SimpleShare. When you unplug
the drive, the folder in /media automagically disappears. (Be careful
though, a bug in Feisty will not unmount it properly and if you're
writing data while you yank it, the volume will be corrupted. You
should really "sudo umount /dev/sda1" to unmount it, then yank.)
> Guess I better find out what all these command lines are for :).
> 'course with Ubuntu I just rarely need them.
That's due to clever coding on Ubuntu's part, but Linux is really all
about the command line. The GUI is just eye candy. It's like early
Windows - Windows was built as a GUI for DOS. This is no longer the
case. In Windows 2000 and later, the GUI became the OS. However in
Linux the real OS is still behind the scenes on the command line, the
GUI is just programs that run on the command line to make pretty
windows.
I am growing to appreciate the power of the command line with certain
command-line programs that are simple yet incredibly powerful like
rsync and diff.
--
Mark Lanctot
'Sean Adams' Response-O-Matic checklist, patent pending!'
(http://forums.slimdevices.com/showpost.php?p=200910&postcount=2)
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