UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello, people. I am pretty new to linux, but I heard it was supposed to be good. So I installed it on an ancient 33mhz 486 with 27mbs of RAM. Ran into problems, patched them, and am here now.

I am trying to figure out how to use my floppy and CD-ROM drives. I click their respective icons on the KDE desktop, and it tells me that it is mounting drives. Then it gives me an error, and I am back at the desktop.

I grab the good 'ole redhat manual, and all it tells me is to type "mount (drive)" in a bash shell. I try that. It doesn't work. Back to the manual. It doesn't give me anything about troubleshooting, just vague instructions.

So I have tryed clicking on icons, typing mystic commands at bash prompts, but nothing works. What can I do?

Is the computer too slow? More ram? Incorrect installation? What is mounting a drive anyway?

As you see, I am in dire straits. Please help. Thank you,
-Furtoes00

Mounting is what you do to make a filesystem available to the system. When you insert a floppy, you need to mount it in order for it to be seen.

Check out the man pages for the mount command. It should have some examples and explanations of how to mount a filesystem provided you know the device paths to a device you want to mount.

To mount the floppy, this will most likely be the syntax

cd mnt
mkdir floppy (if it is not already there)
mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy (be sure you have a vfat formatted floppy disk in the drive)

shimb0