I am totally new to Linux. I am using it for learning purposes and also it is my fall college program.
My question is how can I access other partitions and optical drives?
I have heard things about "mounting" and something about "/dev" but I am not sure at all.
My other partitions are a NTFS XP partition and a Fat32 storage partition then of course linux. I mainly want to get access to the Fat32 because I think I heard briefly that Linux and NTFS are like a snake on mongoose ordeal.
Can any of you super nice Linux pros help a poor confused noob, please?

And also if I was to download a program say a calculator, where would I install it? Or does one install it? I really have no idea. Quite pitiful

Hi, and welcome to LQ!

It's not quite that bad. :}

Getting read-access to ntfs partitions is almost trivial,
read & write to FAT32 is not a big deal, either.

To determine what device you want to mount to which
mountpoint using which file-system, do
fdisk -l

That will list the devices with their partition-types.


As for the optical drives: what interface are they using?
It would also help to know which distro you're using to
give you more specific info about how to proceed.


Cheers,
Tink

Of course how stupid of me
I am using Fedora...version newest one I think. It was late last night so it is whatever I got access to
I am using Gnome interface, I am pretty sure
Thank you for any help. Also I don't know anything about Linux. I am not even sure what mounting is, no pun intended.

Mounting is adding data on a disk partition the the logical file structure presented to the user. All OSes do mounting, but Windows, for instance, is rigid and inflexible about how disks are mounted and does the whole thing for you. In Windows, your primary hard drive is always mounted under C:\, the next hard drive under D:\, etc. Linux does not have drive letters like that, but instead the entire file structure is unified under a single root directory, / (note the directory separator is a forward slash, not a back slash). When you mount a disk (or other device such as a digital camera) under Linux, you are putting the contents of its filesystem under the / directory. So, to close with an example, if the first partition on your secondary master hard drive is FAT32 and you want to put it under /mnt/fat32 in Linux (that directory must exist), you would issue the command:

mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /mnt/fat32

/dev/hdb1 is the first partition of the primary IDE slave. There are tutorials on this site and on the Internet you should check out, but hopefully this gets you started.

You nerds are allllll right
I got the fat32 partition to mount, I had to use /dev/hde5 or whatever, but it was hde that worked. A useful typo i'm sure
I was reading around on other forums and it seems that ntsf is still problomatic. How would I go about doing it, is it something instead of vfat for the command?
But thank you for the fat32 help