Hello all,

I am considering replacing my current installation of Fedora Core 4 with Ubuntu. I have been trying out the LiveCD, but I am having problems mounting the partitions of my hard drive.

The disk is layed out as follows:

/dev/hda1 NTFS Contains Windows
/dev/hda2 ext3 Contains FC4 for now, may be replaced with Ubuntu.
/dev/hda3 swap
/dev/hda5 vfat Other stuff.

The Disk Manager detects these partitions, but I cannot mount any of them.

Any ideas? And what does this mean for a potential installation?

--Sam

Yeah, in this respect, Ubuntu's kind of behind. Knoppix just automounts partitions when you click on them. I don't know why Ubuntu doesn't have this functionality. You'll have to manually edit some config files.

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/mountwindows

Ok, I have been able to access all of the drives. How will the inability to mount automatically affect a potential installation?

Well, Ubuntu won't mount them without user intervention, but once you put the appropriate lines in the /etc/fstab, they'll be automatically mounted every time you boot up.

In some ways, I feel this is what Ubuntu has going for it--it's a pretty solid system once it's up and running, and it has a very supportive community at http://www.ubuntuforums.org.

However, the defaults are kind of crippling sometimes. It has no proprietary multimedia support, and most users want at least MP3 encoding and Flash playback in Firefox. It has no automounting of partitions by default. There's a lot of stuff you have to enable.

Once you get it enabled, though, it's pretty nice.

Interesting; one of the reasons I like Ubuntu is that things seem to work automatically - sound, ethernet card, higher screen resolutions - that I could not get to work at all under Fedora.

Anyway, I'll probably attempt to install Ubuntu sometime in the next week. If I have trouble, there's always the Fedora CDs...

--Sam

Hardware detection in Ubuntu is good. I was talking about random other configuration stuff--codecs, mounting drives.