Mounting drives (CD, floppy,USB ) and partitions (HDD) in Dreamlinux is the same as in any other Linux distribution.

Generally speaking, mounting a drive needs to be done manually by clicking the icon that represents the partition you wish to access. There are however, various ways other ways to accomplish this. Let's examine of of the ways we have available.

UPDATE: Starting with version 2.1 Dreamlinux includes Automount. With this feature mounting CDs diskettes and pendrives (USB) are mounted aromatically by just clicking on the corresponding folder.

Where are the available devices?

You can see the available device and partitions by clicking on the Computer icon on the Desktop. Here you will see the folders that correspond to the devices that exist on your computer: cdrom, floppy, hda1, hda2, etc.

See the figure below:

By right clicking on the folder that represents the device you will see two options, Mount and Umount (just like the command line). Click Mount to mount the device and see it's contents.

If the device is a CD drive or other removable device, an Eject option will also appear int the menu, that when selected will dismount and eject the media.

How does the system know where the devices are?

In the /etc directory in the system root ( / ) you'll find a file called fstab. This text file contains a list of the devices discovered during installation.

As with any text configuration file, you can change it at any time to add another CD device or if you have two, or in the event you add hard drive.

How to automatically mount a CD ROM.

In Dreamlinux there is a very convenient way to mount a CD: keyboard shortcut. Have a look.

Press the F12 key on your keyboard and the CD drive should open. Put a disc in but don't close the drive, just press the F11 key and the drive should close by itself. When the drive is closed the CD will be mounted and a CD icon will appear on the desktop.

UPDATE: This functions independent of Automount in version 2.1.

To eject the CD just press F12 again.

Mounting a pendrive:

In general, pendrives can be accessed by right clicking the sda1 ( first SCSI disk. If your computer boots from a SCSI drive the folder will be different ) folder in Computer folder and selecting Mount. This can be done while the system is running off the Live CD. Once installed the pendrive will be mounted automatically with an icon appearing on the Desktop.

One import detail to note is if the pendrive is formatted with more than one partition, icons will appear on the desktop for each partition encountered. This is also true for an external storage device like USB Hard Drives and iPods.

Other ways to mount and dismount.

There's another resource available in Dreamlinux thats part of XFCE, a plugin that stays active in the Task Panel and shows the state of your hard drives, whether they are mounted and how much free space they have. You install this plugin right click on the Task Bar and select: Add New Item.

Adding an item to the Task Bar.

Choose the applet the Mount devices applet.

The configuration dialog box for xfce-mount.

You can use this plugin to mount and dismount drives directly without having to use the right button.

More Alternatives.

Its also possible to make your own keyboard shortcuts to mount drives, just like the ones that mount and dismount CDs (F11/F12).

Open the keyboard Preferences in the Settings Control Panel and choose the Shortcuts Tab. Select the Dream theme on the left and click Add in the right area (Shortcuts) to define a new shortcut, for example, but entering the command:

sudo mount /mnt/hdb2 (suppose to have another hard drive that you want to mount under /mnt)

next press the keys on your keyboard that want to be the short to run the command. Its best to use key combinations that are not already used such as ALT+2, CTRL+2, etc.

There are still more alternatives. The ones shown here should serve for most purposes.

Translator's Note: Try 'man mount' in the terminal to better understand mounting devices in Linux. The adventurous can try 'apropos mount' to learn about the mount scripts that already exist on your system.

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