Congratulations on making the switch, welcome to a better world. I’m a certified geek, Comp Sci degree and all. I use linux almost exclusively at home. I’m a huge fan of Ubuntu, started using it when warty warthog came out as a beta. Although I’ve actually been into linux for about 6 or 7 years now. To answer your question, I tend to agree with the above poster who said “look it up, it’s half the fun” or something like that. It’s often expressed quite succinctly as “RTFM” (Read The Fucking Manual (or Man-page)). But since you seem to be a bit of a newbie, here’s a little help. Learn to use the man command, e.g.
%man mount
it’ll give you the manual page for the command with all the switches and syntax you’ll need to use it. For mount you’re going to need to provide some information, namely what partition you want to mount, where in your file structure you want to mount it, and what filesystem the partition is. There’s tons of other options but that’s the basics. The partitions are broken down by drive and then partition number. So if you’ve got linux and windows dual booting on one hard drive, call it hda (as opposed to hdb or hdc etc…), and you’ve got your linux distro broken down into root, boot, and swap partitions, you probably have 4 total partitions on the drive. These are hda1, hda2, hda3, and hda4, savy? Most likely your windows partition is hda1 as it was probably there first, but it could be any of them, play around with fdisk to figure out which one is really the windows partition.
Next you need a target to mount the partition to. Traditionally other drives and partitions are mounted in the /mnt directory, although ubuntu has a /media directory which is where cds and dvds automount to so you might want to put your mounted drive there. Either way, find a place you want to mount your drive to and create a directory there, call it whatever you want, I usually go with /mnt/windows, but I’m not very creative.
So, now you know which partition you want to mount, and where you want to mount it to, all you need to do is figure out how to put that information into the mount command and you’re good to go. Some words of caution though. First, older versions of the mount utility don’t recognize NTFS as a file system and you’ll need to call it VFAT, this shouldn’t be a problem with newer versions but I’m not sure. Be careful who you mount it as. If you mount the directory as root or using sudo, you may not be able to access it from xmms or whatever media player you’re using unless you’re logged in as root (which is disabled by default in ubuntu, but can be hacked open if you like, which I do). On the other hand, you may not be able to mount a drive, or at least mount it to a specific location without using su or sudo. I don’t remember the exact specifics, I have mine set up to automount my windows drives on startup (btw, if you want to do that, look at your fstab and mtab files in /etc and you should be able to figure it out).
And lastly, and this is very important, be careful working with NTFS and linux. NTFS read is fine, but writing to it can be tricky, it needs to be built into the kernel or loaded as a module, and even then it’s still experimental and has the ability to royally fuxor your windows partition. Reading is fine, but I suggest you wait until you’re better at using linux or linux is better at using NTFS before trying to write to it.
Ok, long as post over. Again, welcome to the wonderful world of linux, you’ll soon realize that linux is like doing heavy ATG squats with a fitness model and windows is more like standing one legged on a swiss ball while doing 1 arm overhead presses with 8lb dumbbells. (Mac OS is sort of like jumping around on a rebounder in a padded room with 3D glasses on, yeah it looks pretty and you can’t hurt yourself, but it’s not much fun.)
Anyway, let me know if you have any more questions. As I said, I’m a certified geek and self proclaimed aspiring linux guru.
Cheers,
Jay