Question

I have just installed Ubuntu on a machine that previously had XP installed on it. The machine has 2 HDD (hard disk drives). I opted to install Ubuntu completely over XP.

I am new to Linux, and I am still learning how to navigate teh file structure. However, AFAICT), there is only one drive. I want to be able to store programs etc on the first drive, and store data (program output etc) on the second drive.

It appears Ubuntu is not aware that I have 2 drives (on XP, these were drives C and D).

1. How can I mount the second drive (ideally, I want to do this automatically on login, so that the drive is available to me whenever I login - withou manual intervention from me)

2. In XP, I could refer to files on a specific drive by prefixing with the drive letter (e.g. c:\foobar.cpp and d:\foobar.dat). I suspect the notation on ubuntu is different. How may I specify specific files on different drives?

3. Last but notbthe least (a bit unrelated to previous questions). This relates to direcory structure again. I am a developer (C++ for desktops and PHP for websites), I want to install the following apps/ libraries.

i). Apache 2.2 ii). PHP 5.2.11 iii). MySQL (5.1) iv). SVN v). Netbeans vi). C++ development tools (gcc, gdb, emacs etc) vii). QT toolkit viii). Some miscellaeous scientific software (e.g. www.r-project.org, www.gnu.org/software/octave/)

I would be grateful if a someone can recommend a directory layout for these applications. Regarding development, I would also be grateful if someone could point out where to store my project and source files i.e:

(i) *.cpp, *.hpp, *.mak files for cpp projects (ii) individual websites

On my XP machine the layout for C++ dev was like this:

c:\dev\devtools (common libs and headers etc) c:\dev\workarea (root folder for projects) c:\dev\workarea\c++ (c++ projects) c:\dev\workarea\websites (web projects)

I would like to create a similar folder structure on the linux machine, but its not clear whether to place these folders under /, /usr, /home or swomewhere else (there seems to be abffling number of choices, so I want to get it "right" first time - i.e having a directory structure that most developer use, so it is easier when communicating with other ubuntu/linux developers)

Answer 1

Ubuntu should be reading your second partition automatically, all you would have to do to mount it is to click it from the menu bar. You'll need admin/root access to mount the drive the first time, but then it should be permanent until you either restart or unmount.

However, here's helpful link to mounting NTFS drives in Ubuntu. The same page also lists how to mount at startup, just scroll down a little.