Making the Switch-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems

After you've installed your distro, take the time to walk through the various user guides offered online. They will provide an installation guide, a complete tour of the desktop, along with how to manage software installation and upgrades to help get started. I had to go back to square one when I realized that there were too many subtle differences I wasn't understanding. A user guide helped me understand that ALT+Tab manages desktops, for instance, rather than merely switching among open apps.

Some things in GNU/Linux are surprisingly simple. No, really. Take DVD burning. This is all there is:

• Open a Nautilus window, such as Home or Computer. (Nautilus is the file manager.)
  
• Select Places > CD/DVD Creator.
  
• Drag and drop the files you wish to burn into this new empty window.
  
• Click Write to Disc.
  
• In the dialog box, you can change the name of the disc and the write speed if they are incorrect.
  
• Click Write.

And holy crap, it works. Same for my USB flash drive. Even though it was "Vista certified," it would only work in Vista if you applied a low-level format utility in XP! And then Vista wanted to reformat it every single time you inserted it. Under Fedora 7, it was recognized, and "mounted" on the desktop for me to open, copy, delete files to and from. Again, I'm surprised by that because of all things, I figured DVD burning and USB drives would be difficult. Similarly, playing audio files are not difficult either. Here's what the Fedora 7 user guide had to say:

                 Fedora includes complete support for many freely-distributable formats. These are the Ogg media format, Vorbis audio, Theora video, Speex
                 audio, and FLAC audio formats. These freely-distributable formats are not encumbered by patent or license restrictions. They provide powerful
                 and flexible alternatives to more popular, restricted formats such as MP3.

Ogg is a nice, high-quality format, but I'm not converting 40Gb of MP3 files, especially since the MP3 patent expires in 2011. Not a problem. That's fixed by merely downloading the LAME encoder. GNU/Linux supports every audio format except for WMA, which is only partially supported.

Another difficulty is that I have two HDs on this GNU/Linux system, and formatted both of them as ext3 drives during setup. However, the second HD is not "mounted." More reading. Spent an entire night looking for a solution, but the two I did find didn't work for me. Hmmm. Here's what I tried:

• Make a mount point, mkdir /media/seconddrive, then mount it, mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/seconddrive. You should now see your drive available in Nautilus. If this doesn't work then post the output of fdisk -l
  
• Command wise, it is like above. sdxx refers to the device and partition, eg, sdb1 (sd = some device, b = second hd, 1 = first partition). '-t type' refers to the filesystem type, usually found automatically but on occasion it isnt, eg, ext3, ext2, ntfs, vfat (fat32), msdos (fat16).
  
• mount -t type /dev/sdxx /mount/point
  
• With the exception of loopback devices (iso's, encrypted file systems, etc), which are mounted like so.
  
• mount -t type /file /mount/point -o loop
  

I'm not embarrassed to say I didn't understand a single word of the above commands, and overheated my tiny dinosaur brain. More reading, I'll get there. I remember the similar DOS commands, but this is another animal. Meanwhile, I took time out to install Mac OS X in a VM and jeez, I still don't like OS X. It must be me; I still wonder why everyone goes ga-ga over it.

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Part-01: My journey from Windows to Linux
Part-02: Which Linux distro to choose?
Part-03: First impressions and first problems after installation
Part-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems