Hello,

I am very new to Linux and have been using it to run a lighting program called Radiance (not that important). The files that I have created on my Linux box need to be taken into the windows environment...not ideal, but something that needs to be done.

I have had extreme difficulties in completing the mundane task of saving a text file in Linux on a floppy disk and then opening that same file up in Windows NT.

So here is what I have done...I saved some text files on a floppy in windows, then opened then in my Linux machine. Manipulated them and then saved them again to the floppy. It seems like a simple task, then to go back to my Windows machine and using the new text files in the windows environment, but it has not been possible. Windows does not recognize any of the changes that have been made in Linux.

Why is this happening???? Any suggestions or links to place to read up on this would be very welcome!

Thanks in advance for your insight!

-Bob

Ok. The first thing you should know here is mounting. In Linux, partitions and drives must be 'mounted' or attached somewhere in the file system (a folder). Your main Linux partition is 'mounted' as /. Other partitions/drives are mounted on a folder on this main partition . The folders /mnt/floppy and /mnt/cdrom point to your floppy and CDROM drives respectively. They display the drives' contents. When you insert media (or otherwise want to access it), you or Linux must mount it. When you are finished and you want to remove the media, you must unmount it. This frees up the connection and flushes updates to the disk.

So that may explain it - you probably mounted the floppy to open up files but you didn't unmount it before ejecting it. To unmount, right-click on the floppy icon on the desktop, and choose an option that looks like 'umount volume' or 'eject'. Or, run 'umount /mnt/floppy' from the command line. This writes all the changes to disk.

Now seeing that you are sharing files between Linux and Windows, you may want to consider creating a 'share' partition, if you have both OS's on the same machine.