This tutorial is not complete, maybe it never will be. I'm not even sure it knows where it wants to go...

The very first thing that I think you should know -- because you will certainly use the command line or a terminal at least one time:

# preceding any command at the command line means that you will be root
$ or % means that you will be a regular user, you

Very Important:

Linux/Unix systems are case sensitive. What this means to you is learn to type. Seriously, the file Image1.png is most certainly not the same as image1.png. Say it with me...Linux is case sensitive. It's in the details, man.

A file system directory structure in Linux could be the following:

/bin -- Command binaries, or - Programs (like C:\Program Files)
/boot -- Your systems boot files. You'll find Grub in here.
/dev -- Your system devices: hard drives, web-cams, etc.
/etc -- Your system's configuration files, example, /etc/resolv.conf
/home -- Personal directories for your system's users. Your program settings and data is here, your web browser settings for example.
/lib -- The shared library directory. Like the System32 directory in Windows.
/mnt -- Directory for mounting a device, hard drive (file system) temporarily
/media -- New, location of dynamically mounted drives, your cd-rom is here and usb-stick.
/proc -- Doesn't really exist. Created dynamically for system information.
/root -- The root user's home directory. Back off.
/sbin -- System binaries, more programs.
/tmp -- Temporary files
/usr -- Sharable read-only data, containing all user binaries, documentation, etc.
/var -- Non-shared system file variable data directory. Phew! /var/www is where web sites go by default on Debian, /var/lib/mysql for your databases.
/opt -- Common directory for user installed programs. Shared files.

Another set of conventions you should be aware of is the device naming scheme. Without getting too technical I will tell you that Linux allocates the following names to mounted devices:

/dev/fd0 -- First floppy drive. If you have others Linux will name them thusly: /dev/fd1, dev/fd2, etc. /dev/hda -- This is your "master" IDE drive. SCSI drives are named "sda". If you have more than one partition on a drive you can expect to see the following scheme:

/dev/hda1
/dev/hda2
/dev/hda3

As well, if you have more than one IDE (SCSI) drive each drive will have a naming convention ascending the alphabet in order. Example, first hard drive is "hda" second drive is "hdb", etc. Same scheming follows for partitions.

/dev/hdc -- this is your "master" IDE cd-rom drive. From the convention you can surmise that the "slave", or secondary cd-rom device will be named "hdd", and on it goes.

If you poke around in your /dev directory you will see that many "devices" have entries here. Devices like your audio /dev/dsp or /dev/snd. These devices also correspond to aspects of your system's architecture that you need not concern yourself with and are created automatically by your system. On occasion you may have to change the chmod value of a device like /dev/snd to allow sound under certain conditions to certain software. This is outside the scope of this article.

Just for giggles, here is a copy of my /etc/fstab file. This file list the mount points for the system. It's here so you can glean info.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# file system   mount point     type    options         dump   pass
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0

 If you dual-boot with an NTFS Windows partition you may have a line like the following:
/dev/hda1       /mnt/ntfs       ntfs   noauto,users,ro,umask=0  1  0
/dev/hda1       /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/hda2       /home           ext3    defaults        0       2
#/dev/hda3       swap            swap    sw              0       0
#/dev/hdb2       none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/hdc        /media/cdrom0   iso9660 ro,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/hdd        /media/cdrom1   iso9660 ro,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/hdb1       /mnt/vault      ext3    rw,auto          0       0

I commented out my swap partition because I increased my ram to a 1.5GB, I don't really need a swap partition anymore. Also, take a look at the last entry - it's my backup "vault" on my "slave" drive. Notice the OPTIONS: I can read and write to it and it is automatically mounted. If I added "user" like the entry preceding this one then an icon for my backup drive would appear on my desktop.

And speaking of seeing your windows partitions in Linux, let's mount one. If you don't know your partition structure open a terminal, become root and run the fdisk command:

# fdisk -l

Now you can see that the Windows partition that you want to mount is at /dev/hda2 (as an example). So we can mount it now but don't forget to make a directory for it in your /mnt directory:

# mkdir /mnt/winfat32.

To mount the partition run the following command:

# mount -t vfat /dev/hdb2 /mnt/winfat32

To automatically mount your Windows partition at boot time add the following line to your /etc/fstab file:

/dev/hda2        /mnt/winfat32  vfat    rw,user,auto  0       0

If the partition in question is formatted NTFS add the following line to your fstab file instead:

/dev/hdb2        /mnt/ntfs  ntfs noatime,defaults,users,ro,umask=0 0 0

[TIP: if you just changed your /etc/fstab file and don't want to reboot to see the changes run # mount -a as root]

Other people have written in far greater depth - if you really want to learn about this and other Linux conventions, sensibilities, methods and/or procedures I suggest you do a little research ( fstab options ). See below...

I have found a website that delves much deeper than I do. Feel free to browse this site and spend days reading up on this and other Linux subjects. System Admin Guide

\n This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ].

Where are my installed apps?

Many people new to Linux wonder where the programs they install goto. Well, you will not find a C:\Progra~1, I mean: C:\Program Files anywhere on your Linux box. The programs that your Debian system installs, say with apt (or the front-end - Synaptic) will be installed to /usr/bin. The programs that you compile and install (./configure  make  make install) usually goto /usr/local/bin. There are other places, some java apps that you install as root will goto /opt. Others still will create a bin directory in your /home directory. So your environmental variables will include: /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/sbin, ~/bin. You can always alter these, add to them, etc. As well, you may prefix an install location when configuring your install like this: ./configure --prefix=/install/directory. There are many instances when you would add a prefix string to your installs.

Please see the following page for a terrific little convention write up that found somewhere on the web. I think it's OK to post this here, but if it pisses the writer off (s)he can contact me and I'll remove it.