Hero Inc.

Great little image I wanted to share after seeing it on digg.

computer at risk

NTFS file system is Windows based and not for Linux. However, I had an extra internal hard drive that housed my media that would need to be read by Linux. The first thing would be to mount this new hard drive so that Linux knew that it existed.

From the konsole, I used the following command to mount the hard drive:

mount -t ntfs /dev/[LOCATION] /mnt/[HD_NAME]

This worked perfectly, but I still had two issues.

1. The drive was not mounted after restart
2. The drive was read only

To fix the first problem, I had to modify the fstab file located under /etc. Add a line similar to the following to allow the drive to always mount on startup:

/dev/hdb1 /[LOCATION_TO_MOUNT] ntfs-3g defaults,sync,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

NTFS support does not usually come with Linux oob, but you can download a simple program to take care of this. ntfs-config will allow write priveleges through Linux. Additional configurations may also be needed, but this should get you 90% of the way to writing to an ntfs formatted drive.

UPDATED 02/26/2008: Use optional parameter text above instead of the strikethrough that was previously used in the post. Thanks Stuart for the suggestion.

When first moving to Linux, first things first. I need a distro to use.

There are many popular versions available currently. The popular choices are Ubuntu, openSUSE, Red Hat, and many others (DistroWatch contains a huge list of types). I actually tried Mandrake previously on an old machine I had (probably 2 years ago and that only lasted for a week before I got bored/aggravated). The most popular currently seems to be Ubuntu due to its ease of use and brown coloring (maybe not so much that second reason).

Before I installed the current distro I am using, I tried Red Hat Fedora 8 for a week. It seemed very business oriented and didn’t work with my wireless card oob (out of the box). That was irritating and I didn’t have the time to truly troubleshoot it so Red Hat was a bust for me. I did some searching and found that the old Mandrake I had used before had been renamed Mandriva. From the website, it looked like many improvements had been made. My choice was now down to Ubuntu and Mandriva. I’m not a fan of what’s popular most of the time and I had prior experience with Mandriva so I decided to give Mandriva another shot. I tried the live CD for a few days and decided this would be it for me. I ran the install and it seemed that 90% of my hardware worked out of the box with this distro. For those interested, my current machine is a Dell Dimension 4500. The only thing not currently working is my TV Tuner, but that just needs my time and attention to work (it is currently supported).

Mandriva runs the KDE environment by default. GNOME is my other option, but I’ve always liked KDE (seems to be like Windows which eases my transition as a user). Now that I’m installed and set, it is time to play around and learn Mandriva Linux.