I installed Mepis on my hd. I set up this drive to have two partitions and a linux swap file. I would like to make the second partition hda6 a permanent mounted drive and it is a FAT32 and don't know where to find etc/fstab to mount second partition permanently. How can I find this etc/fstab and all the other directories in the system of Mepis.

Also I installed Mepis on a separate HB but the GRUB is loaded in the MBR of the hd. I installed it as a slave but if I were to use Windows as drive C and Mepis as drive D, the GRUB loader takes over.

1. how can I use a boot manager to select either drive C or D and not have GRUB give me problems ?

2. which boot manager would recommend tobe able to do this ?

3. I ask the above because I use several Window drives for different purposes and don't want a permanent install.

4. Is there a way to have KMAIL installed as a icon on the desktop ?

Thanks

Arthur

In order to automatically mount a partition at startup it must be in /etc/fstab.
To write a rule for fstab, first get the partition to mount from the command line (mount -t vfat /dev/hda6 /mnt/fatpartition - the second location must exist, so make it first using the mkdir command)

Once that works you're ready to add a line to fstab. The easiest way to do so is by opening a terminal and becoming root (su). Then you use you favopurite text editor to modify fstab somthing like this:
# gedit /etc/fstab

and add a line similar to this one from my fstab:

/dev/hda6 /mnt/windows vfat defaults,users,umask=000 0 0

No problem:

in linux anything you connect to an ide cable gets the following names:
primary master /dev/hda
primary slave /dev/hdb
secondary master /dev/hdc
secondary slave /dev/hdd
etc...

Grub is slightly different
/dev/hda becomes hd0
/dev/hdb becomes hd1
etc...

an excerpt from my grub.conf file adapted to what might be your setup:

title Fedora Core (2.6.12-1.1398_FC4)
root (hd1,3)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.12-1.1398_FC4 ro root=/dev/hdb2 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.12-1.1398_FC4.img
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

as you can see each entry not only selects a different OS but also a different drive.

Thanks for your suggestions. As I started playing around with Mepis dialing out after I got the Compuserve dialer to work flawlessly giving me a Internet connection, I am having a problem in that when I type microsoft.com it can take better than three minutes to get to Microsoft.com. I selected a template todownload and setup hda6 as the second partition to download a file to, I can seethe location in Mozilla Firefox but nothing seems to be stored there even though I made a directory in the second partition and the downloading time is so slow.

I went back to my Linspire 4.5 on my hd and did a dial-up-connect and that went fast, type in Microsoft.com and it immediately opened up Microsoft.com but in Linspire I am unable in preferences to tell it where to download that file. I atleastknow that my dialing up connection is working and surfing is working BUT even though in Partitions it states that /dev/hda7 /disks/dos vfat, I cannot direct Firefox to download a file to vfat partition.

Will your suggestion how to mount the second partition also help me with Linspire ?

This is most interesting problem.

Thanks for your help.

Arthur

I had problems with amule due to permission settings on the vfat partition. As a matter of fact fat32 partitions arn't very good as far as permissions are concerned and I had to include uid=500,gid=500 (in your case check your user ID to make it correspond) in order to mount the fat32 partition with the right permissions to be able to let amule use it. I don't know if it will solve your problem though...