Coming from windows... many, many basic questions

[Bucky Ball]

... my preference was always to set up personal folders for downloads, images, and so forth instead of using Windows' default folders. Yadda, yadda, long story short: I'm learning to use Ubuntu's defaults more effectively.

Yes, took me awhile to get over that. And it is oh, so easy to have your install with a /home directory on partition A and use symlinks to access your files on data drive B (which may be on a different drive).

ln -s /media/Drive_B/Documents /home/user/Documents

... will produce the shortcut 'Documents' in 'user's' /home directory in / on drive A. It's target will be the 'Documents' folder on partition B.

The syntax is:

ln -s 'path to target' 'path and name of symlink'

Just thought I'd throw that in ...

[lykwydchykyn]

Speaking of symlinks...

#17: A symlink is not the same as a desktop shortcuts. Desktop shortcuts are actual files that contain a location and various metadata about how to access it; they're interpreted by the desktop shell. The .desktop file used by most open-source desktops is the closest analogy. Symbolic links are file-like objects that exist at the filesystem level; they point to another file or directory and effectively create the illusion that the object exists in both places. Windows has something analogous but they're rarely used and most users never encounter it.

[RadicaX]

28. As others have noted, it is recommended against, but I believe the command is sudo su. That means to become a super user, always. (Well, till you exit that mode.) While it is recommended against, Puppy Linux last I tried it was set up like that. Problem with it is, once a piece of malware gets control like this, it is as powerful as the user. And sadly, the internet is not the only way to spread malware, it is very easy to by USB also.

[chili555]

[QUOTE I believe the command is sudo su. That means to become a super user, always.][/QUOTE]I was just going by this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/33106...-su-and-sudo-i

[daner2]

I just want to say a BIG THANKS to everyone for their help. (and polite replies to this new guy! )

I went on a google quest today (6+ hours and counting) and found out a lot of answers and clarifications but the info provided here was very helpful and GREATLY shaved off my (ongoing) search time.

Trying to setup an ubuntu environment I needed, without knowing the ins and outs, took me over 14 hours. Much of that time was spent walking around a lot of obstacles that didn't have to be there. I felt like I had walked into a room with a giant machine and had been asked to make something with it without first knowing how to operate it. I keep thinking "if only I could do that, or I wonder what that means or how that compares to windows?" So I started to keep a log of my questions, so now you know the origin of the giant list.

The linux file system diagram link was especially helpful for diving into things. Synaptic was another great recommendation; I've been trying programs out all day. I'm still doing personal research, but I have a few more questions and want to reiterate some of the questions above that I couldn't find the answer to (or weren't answered) that are particularly troubling me:

1. Something holding back my productivity greatly is the lack of file search utility. The dash board and file manager searches do not seem to search text files for content. Can someone please recommend a search utility that does this quickly, and perhaps how to quickly access it? (I'd like it to be my Windows key if possible because that is what I am used to.) I downloaded a package called Desktop Search but it did not do what I was expecting and did not seem as effective as the built in search. I basically want something that, if I search for something like a particular bit of text (like a setting in some .ini file) it will return the .ini file.
2. I tried to find a way to increase my mouse scroll speed but it appears there is no easy way to do this. I want to verify that there does not exist a solution for this in 12.0.4 (http://askubuntu.com/questions/27270...g-scroll-speed)
3. Can someone confirm that typing

   export HISTSIZE="999999999

   into the terminal will effectively make my terminal history "infinite"?
4. Does a linux path have a drive letter? (c:\). if not, what is the root path, if any? It seems to be just "/". I go to File System and I can see a series of files including my home folder. I am going to guess that each of these are accessed via something like /etc, /home, /bin. Can someone confirm this is true or elaborate? Or are the paths in some way different?

(I'll post these or other questions separately if answers are elusive. I just didn't want to spam the forum with 30+ topics.)

[chili555]

Does a linux path have a drive letter? (c:\). if not, what is the root path, if any? It seems to be just "/". I go to File System and I can see a series of files including my home folder. I am going to guess that each of these are accessed via something like /etc, /home, /bin. Can someone confirm this is true or elaborate? Or are the paths in some way different?

That's essentially correct. Please see:

cd /
ls

I get:

bin dev initrd.img lib64 mnt root srv tmp vmlinuz
boot etc initrd.img.old lost+found opt run sys usr vmlinuz.old
cdrom home lib media proc sbin tftpboot var

The wierdos tftpboot and lost+found and a few others may safely be ignored. 98% of everything I do is at /home/chili. I poke around in /var sometimes to consult a log to see what awful mistake I made so I can un-make it! As has been pointed out above, configuration files are in /etc. I've mostly looked, in order to try to answer a question here, and modified few. That's just about it.

[lykwydchykyn]

It's different, it's a little weird, but at least it's a published standard:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

enjoy!

[RadicaX]

One sounds much like a Database, and if you type something, you just want it to search through everything to find a match. Hmm... I can not think of one like that, but I do not do that often. I am guessing you do some kind of special work with computers managing databases though and if you needed to, could pull up all instances of the phrase "The rabbit is a cold hearted beast."

4. I have not seen no drive letters with any work I have done in the command line. I remember once being told Linux does not really need to do that with path names like Windows does. I am pretty sure it had to do with how the file system manages things.

A note on 1.

grep looks for patterns, and sort lets you sort things in a certain way, but it does not open and check files one by one. So you might be able to write a script that would allow for this, I am sure there probably is one.

[Bucky Ball]

You can open Gparted and have a good look at your partition setup.

[lykwydchykyn]

There are a number of file search utilities available in the ubuntu repos, many of which do indexing of contents. Recoll, swish, tracker, doodle are just a few I found in the repositories. I know KDE comes with this functionality built-in, and I'm pretty sure there's a GNOME file search as well. Often content-indexing is turned off by default since it requires significant CPU and HDD space, so you may need to tweak some options to get that.

I can't tell you which one works best with Ubuntu since I don't use file indexers or the default Ubuntu interface.