Re: Newbie comments & queries
On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 10:24:13AM +0200, Ian Balchin wrote:
> Last night I went through the info documentation system
> which i thought would be a good start. Then read and
> played with the ls command. I uncommented the lines in
> the .bashrc in root to give me colours for ls. I must also
As another poster said, don't experiment in root.
Log in as a regular user and experiment there.
Otherwise you'll have to do the dreaded "install
from scratch" again, guaranteed. As many of us
have done. Learn from our mistakes!
> couple of HOWTO files - the Config-HOWTO and the
> Printing-Usage-HOWTO. Some good bedtime reading there.
Heh.
> Where has my floppy drive gone? I can find it nowhere. I
> can find no command in mc to change drive (come back
> PCTools, all is forgiven!) There is nothing in /floppy and
> nothing in /dev/fd
In unix, there is only one "filesystem" (well, sorta),
there is no concept of "drives" as there is in DOS.
The unix machine has access to one logical filesystem
which is rooted at "/".
The drive(s) on your machine (including any floppy
disks) are partitioned, and then formatted into
"filesystems" (same term as the one logical "filesystem",
unfortunately). Each physical filesystem is then
"mounted" onto the one logical filesystem. See the
following manpages: fs(5), mount(1), umount(1), fstab(5).
Each physical filesystem can have directories and
files, similar to what a DOS machine does.
To mount a filesystem onto the "one logical filesystem",
you run the mount command:
(synopsis)
$ mount -t vfstype device dir
(example)
$ mount -t ext2 /dev/floppy /floppy
Here you are mounting the device accessed by device driver
/dev/floppy onto the logical filesystem at /floppy.
That means any existing files in directory /floppy will
become invisible, and the contents of the floppy disk
will become visible. If the floppy had a directory
hierarchy on it, that will all be available.
Linux will refuse to let you eject the floppy (via
software) until you unmount the drive (the command
is umount, no n). It will refuse to unmount until
the whole directory hierarchy is available. That
means you have to cd out of the floppy hierarchy
before you can unmount the floppy.
(example)
$ umount /floppy
Once you do this, the contents of /floppy that were on
the main filesystem will once again be visible.
It is normal to keep around some empty directories
on which other filesystems will be mounted.
Examples of these are (can be):
/var
/var/adm
/usr
/usr/home
/home
/tmp
/mnt
/cdrom
/floppy
/mnt/cdrom
/mnt/floppy
There are various theories of how much disk space you
should give to various filesystems, and whether
to break up a large (or not-so-large) disk into
smaller filesystems which can be separately mounted
onto the "one logical filesystem", and which parts of
the "one logical filesystem" should (or shouldn't) be
broken off into their own filesystem. I won't get
into them here.
Well I have given you the big picture (as it compares
to DOS), I'll let you read the docs some more.
Note that I made up the terminology of "physical
filesystem" and "logical filesystem", you won't
see it elsewhere, and it's even a little misleading
(no such thing as a physical filesystem) but it gets
the idea across.
One last note, linux supports several filesystem
types, such as ext2, iso9660, msdos, umsdos, vfat.
You can mix them in your logical filesystem tree.
(Ie, a "physical" filesystem has to be all one
type, but the logical filesystem can be composed
of physical filesystems of different types.)
The cd uses filesystem type iso9660. The floppy
can use any filesystem type, but floppies that
windows/dos reads/writes are likely to be vfat, msdos
or umsdos. You can read and write floppies that
DOS/windows reads/writes. I don't know much more
than that on this topic. Except: see man page
mtools(1) (and search for "See also" in this man
page for more man pages).
> I have 16Mb Ram. according to top I have 13.7 of which
> 11.8 is used and 1.9 free. Where has this all gone! I am
> not doing anything yet.
16 Mb RAM should be enough to run Linux without
X Windows, but it is just enough to run linux and
X Windows. If you try to run any sizable applicaton
alongside X Windows you will run into swapping problems.
I realise you are on a budget, but these days memory
is cheap. My advice is to try to get some more.
It will be worth it.
--
bjb@achilles.net
Consider registering as a bone marrow donor
http://www.bloodservices.ca/english/ubmdr
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