Using Linux as an OS is not an easy feat. Who cares if you can have a wonderful GUI, powerful consoles, robust sessions..etc?? So, how can we do our daily tasks like doing up a document for work/presentation, typing e-mails and of course sending and receiving them, surfing the WWW,and lots more without having to dual boot to Windoze??

First of all, many of us, including myself, face difficulties, not knowing some of the very basic commands, what files ot edit and also, what editor to use. How about the greatest challenge, to set up the "Window" GUI??

Well, I will share what I know with lots of pics to guide us through some of the daunting issues. In this first part, I will show you how to mount your "windoze" partitions/drives so that you can access files from there and also, put files there.

You have a quite a few choices when it comes to configuring your filesystem. 1)Use linuxconf, 2)fsconf(in GUI/console) and 3)editing /etc/fstab using any editors eg. "vi".

The console, as seen from the GUI, Gnome.

As you can see, the 2 "/mnt/c" and "/mnt/d" partitions are not the default Linux native partitions created during setup. On a typical installation, there would normally have only the "/" or the root partition and a "swap" partition. Without going into the details of why it is preferred to have different and separate partitions, let us see how a partition can be mounted after a Linux Installation.

FDISK - More powerful and flexible than Windoze's.

Not forgetting to remind you, you have to be "root" in order to make administrative changes to Linux. As for me, I prefer logging in and doing everything as my own identity and only "su root" only when it is neccessary. It is easy to login as root and forget that you can make powerful and unforgettable mistakes like "rm *". After typing "/sbin/fdisk", you will the example above. If you have only 1 IDE hard disk, "fdisk /dev/hda". For 2nd hard disk, substitute "hda" with "hdb".

Before you do anything else, PAUSE! Do you know what to type?

Type "m"

What is important for now is the "p" obtion for listing all partions you have had on your hard disk(hda1/hda2/hda3...etc). The next option, is "w", i.e. to finalise whatever changes you have made to your hard disk PERMANENTLY. Do read the manual that accompanied by typing "man fdisk".

Typing "p"

Don't be confused by the output. The list under "Device Boot" shows you the partitions you have in order of their positions. Think of it that your hard disk is like a rule(r). "/dev/hda1" is the 1st partition you have which starts at "1" and extends to "64", is a FAT16 (ID 6). From here, "/dev/"hda2" which extends from "65" to "523" is actually a "container" to hold the following logical partitions "/dev/hda5 to ..hda8". Armed with the above infomation, you can then add partitions(if you have free space, in this case, I have none), delete partitions etc. To delete an Extended partition, in this case "/dev/hda2", you have to delete ALL the logical partitions first.

*A use for Linux's fdisk is when your FDISK in Windoze fails to allow you to delete/recreate the partition table when it is corrupted.

Managing your partitions/disks

Type the above without the "&" <--bring job to background, if you did not "startx"/start your X.

The "fsconf" GUI,

We will now choose "Access Local drive". As you can see, the "Source" which points to your partitions that are shown in "fdisk" can be allocated "Mount point", directories which holds the contents of the partition. From above, all Linux Native "FsType" is "ext2", while "Windoze/DOS" is "vFat".

Choose "Add"

Here you can specify whether you want to mount the partitions upon bootup or not, mountable by users/system...etc. If you are unsure, "help" is just a mouse "click" away. :>

How about "Swap" partition? or "Virtual memory<--in Windoze"?

From the main "fsconf" GUI, Choose "Configure Swap files....". Do the same as you have done as in the above example.