I cannot understand linux file structure at all! I'm using Dolphin file manager, which I can understand prety well, and is mirable dictu capable of finding a.txt without also finding aa.txt, aaa.txt, abc.txt abcdefghijklmop.txt and 10 million other files I do NOT want, and I can find my external hard drive, but

Where's my DVD drive dude?


and where is /home/lee/.local/share/applications? I've got /lee/home, but no /home/lee. (my name is lee.)

Totally lost.Tearing my hair out.

Hi, and welcome. Open a terminal and run:

Doesn't this return /home/lee ?

As for the dvd, you just insert the DVD and an icon should appear on the left side of Dolphin. You click on it and it gets mounted on /media/<volume-name>.

EDIT:

/home/lee/.local/share/applications is a hidden directory (leading dot). While inside your home directory do an

and you should find a directory named .config.

Have a look at /etc/fstab file. This file has entries for the devices that need to be mounted.

This is the entry for my CD/DVD drive.

From left to right, /dev/cdrom is the device file linux knows the device by. You will have a file for each hardware device on the system. The second field is the mount point in the file system. /mnt/cdrom is an empty directory until the CD has a disc in it, and its mounted. Then you will see the files and directories on the CD ( or DVD ).

The next field is the file system type. auto allows the system to examine the CD, and figure out what file system it on it.

Next is a string of options, noauto prevents the system from mounting the CD at boot time. user allows the user ( me ) to mount the CD, without using root authority. ro says the CD is mounted read only. The two zeros are recovery options.

The only tricky part here is the period in front of local. That makes the directory 'hidden'. You have two choices, look at the application to see if there is an option for listing hidden directories, select it and it will appear.

Other option, use the command console. If you are in /home/lee ( your home directory ) then do a 'cd .local' and press enter. Do not enter the quotes, just what is between them.

What? you just showed us you have /home/lee, are you sure? Don't know how you did that, if you did.

What distro are you using?

@camorri: Having the CDROM in /etc/fstab is deprecated,it is not there by default anymore in most distro

@LeoinNJ: Files or foders that start by "." are hidden files. You can view them by going the Dolphin view menu and select "show hidden files". You do have a /home/lee, but Dolphin hide the "home" part by default so you don't have to care about the Linux directory structure. If you want to learn more about it, read this:

http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/...3/fhs-2.3.html

You don't have to learn it by heart, it will eventually make sense, but taking a quick look at the titles and subtitles and reading what seem interesting to you will take 10 minutes and will help you resolve all the questions you just asked.

It is in Slackware. Then look in /media.

Yes, so does Arch and Gentoo, it is not my point. My point is that it have been replaced by HAL in 2006 and HAL itself have been replaced by deviced then udisks in 2010. Those modern framework allow user privileges applications to mount and umount devices like CD and USB drives without root access. Let take for example a system with 8 usb port. You can add to fstab an entry for "sdb" and add the "user" and "users" mount options to allow regular users to mount it. But what happen if you add a second one and you don't have an entry for "sdc"? Well, the user can't use the USB drive without the root password. How useful! It is those kind of problems that have been solved by HAL/udisks and applications such as Dolphin use them as sole backends, so even if /etc/fstab was proprely configured, and it is not the case, then Dolphin would not work with it anyway. /mnt is also deprecated for removable devices, see link above for complete documentation of why it is the case.

@LeoinNJ: Ignore what I just said, it was off topic.

<<As for the dvd, you just insert the DVD and an icon should appear on the left side of Dolphin. You click on it and it gets mounted on /media/<volume-name>.>>

Nope! No icon. I don't have a directory called /media/<volume-name>. I have "gateway" (machine maker), System. 415.7 Gib Trash, Root Network and Home. That's all.

<<Open a terminal and run:

Code:

pwd

Doesn't this return /home/lee ?
>>

Yes, it does. Which 13th level demon do you have to sacrifice a goat to to find this out? How on God's green Earth are newbies supposed to guess these things? AAAARRRGHHH!

As for the rest of it, I will have to calm down before I can attempt to understand the instructions, but they look good.

Thanks all.

Are you not seeing an empty DVD drive, or not seeing after inserting a data disk in it?

Normally an empty drive is not accessible because there is nothing in it to access.

Does the device show when you run dmesg from a terminal? Here's what I see on my laptop (I have both internal and external DVD drives connected):

That can be accomplished by either using globing or regular expressions. But is there a pattern or are you just trying to find all text files ending with .txt? In the latter case, you can do
Probably /dev/sr0 is the special device file for your dvd drive.

Check in /media for it. If it's not there,

Then it should be at /media/dvd.

Files beginning with a dot are hidden files in Linux. They can be viewed with ls -a command. -a means all. In Dolphin, you can View>Show Hidden Files.

I suggest getting some reading material or videos to familiarize yourself with Linux/GNU. You may not be interested in using the command line at all, but being a little familiar with it doesn't hurt. Many modern distros, just about everything you can want done can be done through the GUI now.

You're not supposed to guess to figure out. There's plenty of books, linux wikis, reading material, websites, google, etc with this information.

I do not see a DVD drive in Dolphin, onqwuereor, nor any other file manager I have tried. This is true whther there's a disk in it or not.
What I get when I type dmesg is too long to enter here (57723 characters) but here is some of it:
the characters "DVD do appear there, but I cannot make any sense of it.


[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bab75000 - 00000000bab76000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bab76000 - 00000000bab7c000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bab7c000 - 00000000bab7e000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bab7e000 - 00000000bab8e000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bab8e000 - 00000000bab9c000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bab9c000 - 00000000babf1000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000babf1000 - 00000000bac34000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bac34000 - 00000000bb000000 (usable)
....
lee@lee-DX4860:~$

This is much too complicated for me to understand. how do a copy a file to the DVD?

here is another attempt

# dmesg | grep DVD
[ 1.407882] ata5.00: ATAPI: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH70N, UGA0, max UDMA/100
[ 1.419646] scsi 4:0:0:0: CD-ROM HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH70N UGA0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
lee@lee-DX4860:~$

what does this mean, and how do I copy a file to the DVD?
Why is that so impossible?

How many PhDs in computer science do you need to copy a file?


>Files beginning with a dot are hidden files in Linux. "/home/lee" does not begin with a dot.They can be viewed with ls -a command.Where do I issue this comman? in Terminal? That's not Dolphin -a means all. In Dolphin, you can View>Show Hidden Files.<<

No I can't. I can show line numbers, but that's all.



you recommend

su -
of course the res fails too
mkdir /media/dvd
sudo mount -t auto -o ro /dev/sr0 /media/dvd

when I type "su -", it asks for my password, when I type it correctly, it says "authorization failed"

WHY CAN'T I COMPY A SIMPLE FILE TO THE DVD?????

I do not appear to have any volume/directory/drive called "/media". Where is it hiding? I have seen it before, but can't recall where/how to see it.
I can find my external hard drive easily. where is the DVD? Why is this so hard?


>>
You're not supposed to guess to figure out. There's plenty of books, linux wikis, reading material, websites, google, etc with this information.<<
How do you look something up if it's impossible to understand?

where, for exAmple, might I find the above code
su -
mkdir /media/dvd
sudo mount -t auto -o ro /dev/sr0 /media/dvd


What on God's gren earth does this mean, anyway? What does "su" mean, and what is the import of the "-"? What does "sudo" mean? Why would I have to make a directory called "/media/dvd" when it isn't a directory (it's a drive, isn't it?) and it should exist already? What does "-t auto -o ro /dev/sr0 /media/dvd" mean? How is anybody supposed to understand this Martian gobbledegook when people won't explain it?

I am trying, really!



Thanks for your courteous answer, but it is no help at all. I am obiously not on the same planet as this.

To burn files to the DVD, install "K3B", the KDE cd/dvd burning application. If the CD/DVD is empty, it wont show up, it is normal. Dolphin does not support DVD burning, this is handled by K3B.

In Ubuntu, go to the software center and download it, or open a terminal and type "sudo apt-get install k3b". Then it will be in the menu. Sorry if nobody told you that before, but you never said you wanted to burn something. We didn't knew. Sometime it is hard to answer a simple question without knowing the exact question. K3D is a very nice and simple DVD writing software, yet very powerful.

I do not wish to burn DVDs(I do know how to do that) so much as
1: See the files on the DVD, This is possible in Windows.
2; Read or copy files on or off the DVD drive. This is possible in Windows. Just like a floppy disk! rRmember them? They contained files you could actually see and read (what a concept!)
They were useful before they became impossible.

I have an unlabelled disk under my desk. How do I determine what's on it if my computer can't find it? Is this too much to ask?

You certainly should be able to open an optical disc and browse its contents in Linux in much the same way you do in Windows.

I am assuming that you have tested the disc(s) you are using in another machine so you have ruled out the media as the cause.

Here's a trouble-shooting suggestion:

Boot the computer to a Live CD and test whether you can browse a known-good disc from the Live CD. Knoppix is a good choice, but there are many others.

If you have an external CD/DVD drive or could borrow one for an evening, that could also be used for testing.

That could indicate whether the problem is with your software load or might be a symptom of something larger.

Edit: I just had a thought. If the CD/DVD you are using was created by a Windows user, it is possible it was burned in the Windows Live File System Format, which is readable only by Windows?

I didn't notice you were running Ubuntu. In that case,

sudo mkdir /media/dvd
sudo mount -t auto -o ro /dev/sr0 /media/dvd

Normally you wouldn't need to use commands. Are you running Kubuntu? You mentioned Dolphin, so I am guessing Kubuntu, not Ubuntu.

It sounds like you are experiencing a bug, probably in the distro you're using because you can't access the dvd from the GUI. You may want to try another beginner friendly distro such as Fedora 17 or Linux Mint.

You can run them as Live CDs (or dvds). This allows you to run it without installing it. Test if your dvd drive is working from the GUI before you decide to install one.

So the commands given to you didn't work. It always helps to copy/paste the output from them. We can't see what's on your screen.

Or you may have burned the disk using "Windows Live File System Format" as another user suggested. Have you tried putting a different DVD in the drive, a blank DVD just to see if it works?