Re: 8 Newbie Questions
Peter Makholm wrote:
>There is no such thing as drive letters.
>
>Partitions are mounted around in the directory structure and you move
>around just like on any other directory.
>
>Either you mount it (on /floppy) or uses mcopy from the mtools
>package.
>
>Read some book about unix. I'm very sorry but you seem rather clueless
>on some fundemental stuff and then its hard to help.
Yes, I'm clueless about linux basics. I'm three days into my installation
of linux and have never seen it nor any unix operating system before now.
I've been using pc's since they came out (70's onward). The funny thing is,
I'm a pc tech support person working for a multi-billion fortune 200
company and I assumed that linux would work as many other computer systems
work, i.e. with drive assignments. (Cocky Translation: 'If it's on a pc I
can figure it out'. I've been humbled...)
I know dos and windows and thousands of applications extremely well. I
don't know linux other than what shows up when I type 'help' and what i've
gleaned by perusing the linux newsgroups and linux web pages. Lots of stuff
there that doesn't apply to navigating or altering kernels.
Since I just installed linux a few days ago from my debian 2.1 cd there
will be a slight learning curve during this week. One way or another I'll
know linux well enough in less than a week that I can teach others how to
install, navigate, and change the setup of their linux... I know computers
I just don't know linux's command structure and syntax, yet. Once i start
navigating I'm gonna take my linux apart kernel by kernel and see what
makes it tick. Then I'll no longer be clueless.
For now I can only associate what I know of other operating systems with
linux. I've read a ton of sites, and none that I've come across so far are
written well enough to go from install to expert. They waste a lot of
words and tell very little about navigating about linux and very little
about controlling linux kernels. They all assume that since I already
installed linux I must know how to use linux. I think I just got lucky
installing debian -- others say it's a challenging installation and it's
running on my pc... sort of :)
Like most pc instructions, the sites I've come across so far seem written
for those who already know what to do with the information. One of my
'favorite' sites explained how to copy from a floppy. It 'said' copy some
files from a floppy but didn't tell 'how'. They also said to copy mtools
to your partitioned drive and then run mtools commands from there using
drive assignments like a:, c:, etc. The assumption was that I already knew
how to copy the files to the drive using Linux. Now if I knew that I
wouldn't have searched for [+linux +"how to copy files from a floppy"] :)
Anyhow, that's why I asked for help here (btw thanks for your detailed
help. I figured I'd be lucky to get a reply to just one of my questions,
you gave an answer to looks like each question I asked). Now I'm going to
try to play with linux and see if I can get it to recognize my floppy and
allow me to copy files to the system so I can run lots more stuff...
>Edit you /etc/fstab and put auto as an option in the line mentioning
>/dev/fd0.
>
>Please read "man fstab" first.
I must have installed something incorrectly because 'man fstab' says:
"can't open the manpath configuration file /etc/manpath.config"
When I cd /etc and then type ls manpath.*, it shows manpath.config.dpkg-new
I'm guessing this means the installation was interrupted or is this the
same as manpath.config just with extra extensions?
Thanks very much for your help!!!
Andre'
... headed back to http://www.debian.org
Read a book? Is that a text file or pdf?
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