Re: LINUX basics

"Ian W. Wright" wrote:

> From: "Ian W. Wright" <Ian@...>
>
> HI all,
>
> As a precursor to getting a full LINUX system up and running (still
> saving for a big enough hard disk for the spare computer) I have
> downloaded and set up the Dragon Linux 75 mini-system which fits in only
> about 20Mb on the normal PC. Having done this, and apparently getting it
> working OK, I am now stuck! All the documentation I have found so far on
> the web seems to assume a starting level of competence way ahead of me
> and I find that I can't even work out how to do simple things like get
> the program to tell me what is on a floppy disk or install a simple word
> processor.
> Does anyone know of idiot level starter documentation or have any
> experience with Dragon Linux. I appreciate that this cut-down version
> will have some limitations which will disappear when I can get my copy
> of Redhat 5.2 and Xwindows loaded but surely it should have the
> wherewithall to perform the simple basic operating tasks - if I can't
> master this, what chance am I going to have with EMC????! ;o)

Well, here are a few things I know how to do. Mounting a DOS
floppy onto the Linux file system : mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
The "-t msdos" tells it that it will be mounting an MSDOS file system.
"/dev/fd0" tells it the physical device will be the first floppy drive.
"/mnt/floppy" is a preallocated place in the file system tree to attach
the floppy into the whole file tree. Once this command has executed,
you can do things like "ls -l /mnt/floppy" and see the files, sizes,
creation dates, etc. for the DOS disk, just like it was a Linux directory.
"umount /dev/fd0" unmounts the floppy. (This all applies to Red Hat
Linux, but should be quite similar on most Linux systems.)

emacs is the 'word processor' of choice on Linux (at least for me).
It should be available for any Linux system.

Without the Red Hat manual (or some other book on how to set up and
use Linux) you will be at a big disadvantage. Of course, there are tons
of How-To's on the Red Hat web site, and other Linux web sites.

Jon