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HELP with using floppies and CDs

You can use CD-ROMS and both PC or Mac formatted floppies in these machines. Unlike MS-DOS systems (including the Windows varieties) you must tell the machine when you want to use a removable disk. This is an artifact from Linux/UNIX's multiuser history combined with PC hardware's inability to reliabily inform the system when media is inserted. Fortunately, while a bit inconvienent, it is not a serious problem. Especially since we have provided a simple applet to simplify the process. Follow the menu choices on the Start Menu shown below:

This will bring up a simple control panel, like this:

Using it is simplicity itself. Insert a disk or CD and click on the icon with the logo representing the disk inserted. Click it again to tell Linux you are done with it before removing it. CDs will eject themselves when unmounted or if you forget and log out with one in the drive.

Of course just mounting a disk doesn't tell you how to actually USE it. Unlike DOS, Linux has no concept resembling "drive letters". It has a simple directory structure which can seamlessly span any number of physical disks, networked connections, etc. However, by longstanding tradition some things tend to always appear in certain places. Removable media such as floppy disks, CDs, etc. are found as subdirectories of the /mnt directory. MS-DOS formatted floppies appear in /mnt/floppy, Mac formatted floppies in /mnt/macfloppy and CD-ROMS in /mnt/cdrom. Assuming you are logged in as "patron", your normal working directory is /home/patron which means you won't automatically see the contents of your disk or CD. As an example, let us suppose you want to save an image you are viewing with Netscape to a disk you either brought with you or purchased at the desk. Here is how you would do it:

1. Insert the floppy in the drive
2. Run the MediaMounter tool and click on the Windows icon. Wait until the word MOUNTED appears to the right. If it says ERROR instead, ask for assistance.
3. Point to the image and press the right mouse button, pick Save Image As.... from the menu.
4. Assuming the image's name is image.gif the default save location will read /home/patron/image.gif. Change it to read /mnt/floppy/image.gif instead to save it to the floppy instead of the hard drive on the computer.
5. Click the Windows icon again on the Media Mounter to let the system know you intend to remove the disk. This is important because Linux gets part of it's improved performance through aggressive disk caching so it can be as much as 30 seconds or more before the file you saved actually gets completely written to the disk.
6. When the word EMPTY appears and the light on the drive goes out you can safely remove your disk.

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