How to browse across multiple disks in linux
 

I still have lots to learn about this operating system as you may have guessed!

I have Fedora Core 1. Having come from windows environment I think that I undertsand the bit about having to right click the desktop to select a drive to browse but is there an equivalent of windows explorer that would let me navigate up to the equivalent of 'my computer' level and then come back down into any of the drives (HDD / CD / DVD etc)? Or is there a way of switching between drives when in the explorer window?

PS I appear to be browsing the directories in something called nautilus...

Hi!

I don't think there is any such tool. The reason is that the file system in Linux works in a different way from DOS/Windows. You only have one file system rooted at /. If you want to add another drive or device, then you need to mount it in that file system. For example, a CD can be mounted at /mnt/cdrom. Then the files on the CD appears in your file system at that location.

I don't know how similar Fedora is to RedHat 8, but I have something called "Mount Tool". It can be found in the "Start" menu as "System Tools" > "Disk Management". With that tool, you can mount drives and then browse them with Nautilus.

Good luck!
Martin

Hey,
I don't know anything about Fedora -- I used to use RH9 though and from what I can tell (if you're using Nautilus) they're going to be fairly similar. If you want to browse through multiple disks you first need to know where they're mounted. The way these things work in Linux is that your first harddrive (presumably where the system is installed) is going to be "hda" (it was in RH9). From there you've got a couple of options: if you have another HDD then it'll be mount according to what's in /etc/fstab (try from the terminal, "cat /etc/fstab"). There you'll see where all your drives are mounted. If you want to browser through a CD try running user mount tools. It should be in the main gnome panel (akin to the start menu in windows). Or you could run it from the command line with "user-mount-tools" (I can't remember the exact command, but it's something like that). As for DVDs, they'll either be mounted to /mnt/cdrom or /mnt/dvd (my version of RH9 mounted CDs and DVDs to the same location). If you want to browse these disks from Nautilus go up to the "/" folder and then go to "mnt" and from there you should see "floppy", & "cdrom." By the way, the folders in /mnt will be empty if there's nothing mounted there, so make sure to mount the drives first. Hope this helps, if you've still got questions, just ask again and I can try to help.

You might want to look at the konqueror file manager. If you go under Settings -> Toolbars -> Show Extra Toolbar, the extra toolbar has a split/view left/right and a split/view top/bottom. This also works on web pages. You can for instance have a ftp site on the left, and the target directory on the right, and drag the icon over to left to download. I'm using Konqueror 3.1.4 (Using KDE 3.1.3).

Oh, I almost forgot, It also has tabbed windows. I find the konqueror web browser to be superior to internet exploror.