Newbie Questions
 

I recently moved from Mandrake, and I have couple of questions. How to I get debian to recognize my FAT32 partition that I created so I could swap files from windows to linux. Also, what should I add to my sources list to allow me to get debian's documentation.
Please explain the steps so I can learn what I'm doing.

debian should recognize it automaticly. just run fdisk -l to find out what partition it is, lets say /dev/hda3, create a place to mount it: mkfs /mnt/win , then mount it: mount -t vfat /dev/hda3 /mnt/win

Ok, what do I add to my sources list to get debina documentation? Anything else a newbie should know?

"Ok, what do I add to my sources list to get debina documentation?

Nothing.

Sources.list has nothing to do with documentation.

"Anything else a newbie should know?"

Go to debian.org > documentation > manuals > APT-HOWTO

read the APT-HOWTO, and the other manuals, and don't come back for a week, and when you do, ask sensible questions.

I honestly don't know how deb is installed, I've never installed it, i would assume there is a "Document" section in the installation though

edit: backs slowly out of this thread

macondo gave a good suggestion when he/she politely directed you towards the debian.org webpages documentation section for the best place to find documentation. I haven't used Mandrake so I'm not sure what sort of documentation comes with it, but there is HEAPS online at debian.org.

There are also the standard man and info pages for each application and the various how-to's at tldp.org that will help.

How'd you go at getting /etc/fstab setup to mount your fat32 partition? If you're having trouble, post the output of 'cat /etc/fstab' here.

The best thing for you to know is that 'apt-get' and 'apt-cache search' are going to be your good friends from now on!

Daniel

dan and macondo,

I was looking for a way to take the documentation online and store it on my computer. I was asking a general question, and I was not trying not to act like a stupid newbie. I understand that it's my obligation to find the stuff myself, but I was looking for a push in the ight direction.

This is actually good advice, but it really does come off the wrong way. Even sensible, patient people are put off by this kind of response.

Concerning documentation, as mentioned the Debian homepage has a lot of great documentation:
http://www.debian.org/support

Look in "Documentation" and you will find plenty of stuff. The documentation is generally available at least in plain text, PDF and HTML, all of which you can put on your computer to read. For example, I've just installed Debian this week for the first time (actually I did it twice because I learned something the day after the first install), and was able to read the installation PDF on my wife's laptop while installing on my desktop. The plain text file is quite useful too, -- I downloaded it in Win2k and put it on a FAT32 partition, then mounted that and read it using "more" because I didn't want to get out the laptop. :)

As far as reading from the FAT32 partition goes, AAnarchYY said it right. I'll try to help you understand the steps. (I find it great that as a Linux newbie I can still explain some Linux stuff. :) Hopefully someone will step in and clear things up if I say something wrong.)

"Recognizing" it is a question of mounting it. This is nothing particular to Debian, it is a general Linux question. Using the program fdisk (which could also be used to partition the hard-drives, so be careful with it) will allow you to see what partitions exist on your hard disk. You should know on what physical harddisk your Windows is installed on. If you have two harddrives, and Windows is on the master, then it will be located on hda.

Let's assume then that Windows is on hda. The name hda is a representation Linux uses to denote the physical IDE device (assuming you have IDE drives); hd stands for hard-drive or hard-disk, and a means the first one. A hard-drive on the slave connection would be hdb. If you were using SCSI hard-disks, they would be sda, sdb, sdc, etc. The partitions on the device are then represented with numbers: the four primary partitions of an IDE device on the master connection are (if they exist) hda1, hda2, hda3 and hda4. Logical partitions are from hda5 and up.

Now to see what is already mounted, you can type in from a shell the command "df". This will show you the devices that are mounted. Probably the FAT32 partition is not already mounted. (I am assuming that your Windows XP is installed on a FAT32 partition instead of NTFS. Tsk, tsk, naughty person. You could also have XP on NTFS and a separate partition explicitly for swapping that both OSes can write to that is FAT32.) Let's say that the df command doesn't show you the partition on which XP is installed -- that is likely the case. Now you'd like to know where it is, so that you can mount it.

That is where fdisk comes in. I will explain a different way than what AAnarchYY suggested. Simply enter in the following:

> fdisk /dev/hda

After hitting enter, fdisk will "look up" the entire hda device. You'll see that fdisk gives prompts you for an instruction, and says you can enter 'm' for help. Hit 'm', and look at the whole list of possible options you have. There is an option 'p' that will tell fdisk to display (write) the partition table. (It writes it on the screen, not on the hard-disk!) It will then give a list of all partitions that exist on the disk, whether they are Windows, Linux, or anything else it could possibly recognize (there's a fair list I think).

From this output you should be able to recognize which partition Windows is on.

Exit fdisk and find or create a place to mount it. In the location /mnt there should already exist a large number of default locations for mounting a large number of possible partitions. Let's assume that Windows is located in /dev/hda1. You could then mount the Windows partition onto /mnt/hda1. The suggestion of AAnarchYY was to make a location called /mnt/win. You could also create a /mnt/winXP or a /mnt/fat32. (I had never heard of the mkfs command before.)

Now it's time to mount the partition; assuming that WinXP is on hda1:
> mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/winXP

or

> mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/winXP

If you have questions about how to use mount, just do a manpage on mount:
> man mount

I can also recommend that you go out and buy (or stay in and order online) a book called the Debian GNU/Linux Bible. Make sure to get the most recent version.

Hope that helps,
Mike

Oh, and there is a way to have Debian always mount this partition as part of your startup routine. I think you would have to put it in fstab. That's another, but similar, can of worms.

Cheers,
Mike

Are you trying to get the documentations for offline viewing? There are deb packages containing the howtos in the distribution. They are doc-linux-txt, doc-linux-html and friends. You probably do not have to edit your sources.list for this.

"I was looking for a way to take the documentation online and store it on my computer. I was asking a general question, and I was not trying not to act like a stupid newbie. I understand that it's my obligation to find the stuff myself, but I was looking for a push in the right direction"

APT-HOWTO
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ap...en.html#s-help

"7.2 Where can I find help?

If you find yourself plagued by doubts, consult the extensive documentation available for the Debian packaging system. --help's and manpages can be an enormous help to you, as can the documentation contained in the /usr/share/doc directories such as /usr/share/doc/apt.

If this documentation fails to drive your fears away, try looking for the answer on the Debian mailing lists. You can find more information about specific user lists on the Debian website: http://www.debian.org.

Remember that these lists and resources should be used only by Debian users; users of other systems will find better support from the community resources of their own distributions."

apt-cache search <package>
example: apt-cache search documentation

apt-cache show <name of package>

will give give you a description of the documentation.

Whatever you do, read this thread, it might help you.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=224547

Macondo

Thank you and everyone else on this thread. I had already found the packages that gave me the documentation I was looking for. Macondo, your last post helped me a lot. I was able to mount my FAT32 and NTFS partitions(I had no choice as to what FS XP was on. It came on my computer).

THanks again