Hey,
I recently installed Ubuntu and i must say its awesome. But i'm having problems with mounting my disk. I added the following entry into the fstab:

/dev/hda5 /mnt/dump vfat gid=500,uid=500 0 0

This same entry worked fine for me in Fedora Core 2. But in Ubuntu although the disk gets mounted the file and directories appear as unrecognized (unassociated with any program) icons. Even directories appear as unrecognized files making files within them unaccessible.
Any suggestions.

And secondly this is the first time i'm workin on debian based linux so i wanted to know that debian is not rpm based rite? I'll require .deb files rite?

Maybe you could try the following. First get the gid and uid values of your username, which you can get by using the "id" command, like so:
Replace <username> with your username. Make a note of the gid and uid values, and use them instead (unless they both happen to be "500" of course).
Hope that works.