[Wine] Re: Windows and Ubuntu and Windows and......

[jorl17]

ubudunce wrote:
> Thanks for that. I did search but, as usual, its knowing the correct Q to ask, particularly in Google.
> 
> Unfortunately, I dont seem to have a  home/.gvfs folder or a /mnt or a etc/fstab folder. Dont forget you are talking to a guy that has had a whole 4 days with Ubuntu, so i really do need my hand held here.
> 
> I can see the drive on "places" and if I click on it, it opens and places a folder on the desktop. Not sure if that helps you guys, but I am at a loss as to what to do. I am not even sure if it is a Samba share. I just browsed the network and went into "Server1", right clicked "Data" and clicked on "mount".


Alright, this is less related to Wine and more related to the overall Unix experience.

You *have* /etc/fstab. It is granted that you do. The thing is that it is  not etc/fstab, but /etc/fstab. You see, in Windows you had C: and D:, but in here you have whatever you want. These "mount points" can be /my_drive or /etc/my_drive, or anything else, really! Usually, though, they're in /mnt and /media (remember that names are case-sensitive in Unix). One very important mountpoint is the root of the file system, where the tree branches from: it's "/". The "system root" is at /, so all absolute paths will necessarily start with /, which is where the tree starts: There's nothing before it. There are even ways to temporarily change your root, but that's a whole different subject. The important thing to remember is that if you're using an absolute path, you'll have to have it start with /.

As for "home", you shouldn't type "home" in there. In Linux, all users have a home folder. root, for instance, is many times found in /root. However, in Ubuntu, this defaults to a /home/$USER folder. What's $USER, you say? It's an environment variable that holds the username of the current logged in user. So in my Linux, if I type "echo $USER" in a console, it spits out "jorl17", which is my username. If, however, I am root and type that, I get "root".

Much like $USER, other variables are commonly used, such as $PWD (has the current directory), or $HOME, which points to the home folder that I have been talking to. In my case (because I set it up like that), it is /home/jorl17, but when I'm root, if I do "echo $HOME", I get /root. So it isn't sure that /home/$USER is the same as $HOME (which many naive scripters assume).

Out of curiosity, you can see what environment variables you have defined by opening up a terminal and typing "env" (without quotation marks). One of the most important ones is $PATH, which you should google right away ;).

If you clicked mount and it is in a Windows machine, it is almost certainly a samba share.

As you get used to Linux and Unix you should get familiar with the concepts of mounting, mount points, as well as some essential utilities that exist in the shell:

	 echo prints text and has many options

	 cat prints the contents of files. (ex: cat /etc/fstab)

	 grep is used to filter the output of text, as to find files.

	 find recursively lists the current directory and can be used with many options to effectively find files.

	 locate is another utility similar to find but that uses indexing (someone correct me if that's wrong) to make it work faster

	 which tells you where a program is in your $PATH

	 etc


Those were just a couple of utilities that I spit out to make you familiar with the things you'll see in many linux forums. With practice you'll master them, but don't expect people to tell you to click this and that, particularly because Linux is so fragmented and so many different interfaces exist.[1] The terminal/console is Universal and goes far beyond Linux, touching the beautiful and powerful superiority of the Unix way of doing things. 

[1] Fragmentation is everywhere in the world of Linux. For instance, there are truly no universal graphical interfaces or even toolkits. Some people use Gnome, others KDE, others XFCE, etc. Then the different toolkits arrive, such as GTK, Qt, FLTK. While this is very positive for the control of the system (it is highly configurable; I, for instance, have no Gnome or KDE: I run openbox with fbpanel,  my own programmed utilities, pcmanfm and some other things I added), it is not healthy for the community as a whole. You also see fragmentation in the sound infrastructures, with the classical ALSA vs OSS and ALSA w/o Pulseaudio vs ALSA w/ Pulseaudio, etc. Get used to this kind of fragmentation: it gives you tremendous power, but it also tears apart a community made of so many intelligent people.

Cheers,

Jorl17