Newbie Needing Help

MarkR

Probably jumped ahead abit, but reading through my beginners linux book, I was looking at the drive information on my computer. I had my usb pen drive attached at the time, and noticed an odd win 95 partition detected. Thought it was strange as had wiped the drive. After taking it out and checking I figured it was the pendrive(/dev/sda1).
Next to mounting it. I made the directory in the mount place (can't remember seamantics, so forgive me) and got as far as editing the fstab file. Only I can't. It's always read only. I'm assuming that I don't have the right access rights, even though i tried in xterm logged in as root. Tried to open it in gedit, no luck. What am I doing wrong? Btw, using that fedora dist that came on that magazine last week.

Mark

Enygma

You need to be root to edit the fstab file. su to root and then use 'vi' to edit the file.

Linux will only pick up the Pen drive if you boot up with the drive connected (well, for me anyway). I use gnome and it automatically adds an icon to the desktop.
In KDE you can add a drive to the desktop very easily.

Mine showed up as /dev/sda4 too.

Hope this helps somewhat.

MarkR

When i tried that using the xterm thing It brought up a number, six hundred something. Is that how you add the line? I got a bit lost there.

Enygma

Look for a tutorial on using vi, it's not exactly straight forward but once you get used to it its really pretty good.

DaemÈn

"man vi" in the terminal will give u all the escape commands - its worth printing out until u get used to them as vi gives u no display when entering commands

niallb

Use whatever editor you're comfortable with.
That said, vi is worth getting comfortable with!

You could edit /etc/fstab using gedit if you like,
it just has to be as root.

For getting used to vi, try vim instead.
<F1> gets you to a help screen.
There is also a tutorial called vilearn
which is worth searching google for.
It's the best quickest introduction around.

If you're already in vim and you want the manpage,
just type the word 'vim' ESC and press SHIFT-K.
This shows the manpage for any word under the cursor.

If installed, gvim will give you a vi editor with menus tacked
on to it which might give you more choices.
http://cream.sourceforge.net is another "frontend"
to look at.

NiallB

theciscokid

kwrite

Gavin

Are you su'ing to root in the xterm and then loading gedit from there ?

From the shell, a decent editor for starting off with is nano. Vim is good, but will take a bit of getting used to. Use nano until you are more familiar with linux in general.

so at a root prompt, try type nano /etc/fstab
assuming nano is installed..

You don't have to add an entry to /etc/fstab to mount a filesystem if you don't want to.

you can just make the directory
and type mount /dev/sda1 /whatever/the/directory/is

you may have to specify a filesystem type, but it will usually just pick it up itself and sort itself out.

By adding an entry to /etc/fstab it will save you a bit of time as in you can just type mount /dev/sda1 or mount /directory and it will mount it.

Gav

MarkR

Thanks folks, i'll try all that later. Had to take down the christmas decorations last night, but i'll keep trying.

Thanks,

Mark

MarkR

Whoo hoo! Got my pen drive working. Now i can really get going. :-)

Thanks again,

Mark

DaemÈn

As we were talking about 'vi' i found a very handy "cheat sheet" as they call it on ftp://194.105.193.56/pub/warez/books/os/VI_SHEET.PDF if anyone is interested.