I noticed from reading other threads that it seems to pertain to recognition of devices such as CD or USB drives. I need a god explaination of what it is. In windows (Gasp, cough...) things are plug and play and most of hte things I have used with Linspire have been so far as well, no need to mount anything. So when does this issue come up?

well, have you ever double-clicked on "My Computer" in windows and watched an icon appear when you plug your flashdrive in? or your ipod, or whatever? that's essentially the equivalent. linux needs to map the device to a location in the filesystem. so if you want to mount a data CD-Rom for instance, you create a mount point in the filesystem:

mkdir /mnt/cdrom

and then you tell the kernel to mount the device there:

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

and now you can cd into /mnt/cdrom and see your data. be aware though, that this DOES NOT APPLY TO MUSIC CD's. those are plug'n'play.

When you insert a cd you need to mount it to a point in your filesystem so it can be used, interacted with etc. So linspire would do that for your automatically, others don't. type man mount in a terminal to get some info on the command.

You may have noticed that Linux does not have the concept of, say, a "C:\ drive."

In Linux, there is just one hierarchy of files, beginning with "/", and every file on every drive is found somewhere within that tree.

mounting is the process of telling Linux that you wish to access the files on a particular device (and partition). Linux will read the label on the drive, determine what kind of filesystem it uses, and will make all of the files available (subject to whatever security limits may apply to them).

The files will appear at some point in the overall file hierarchy. For example, if I enter the command: mount /dev/hdc /mnt/backupdrive, the files on the drive (and partition) /dev/hdc will become available, located "underneath" the mount-point /mnt/backupdrive. After you finish with this command, issuing ls /mnt/backupdrive (assuming that you have permissions) will show you the files in the outermost directory of that device.

Thanks everyone for your responses. Yes in Linspire it does it automatically but now I'm experimenting with Fedora a bit. Linspire still has Mount as an option in a drop down menu. So far I haven't had a situation come up where I needed to mount anything. Yet anyway.

I'm sorry, but IIRC, the Plug and Play technology reffers to the ability of a computer to recognize a device, not media support like CDs or DVDs, so you can't talk about a PnP CD. Also, the PnP functionality is incorporated into the bus, not the peripheral itself. The devices only comply with the standard.