Help with desktop partition mount

[ICMike]

First of all I'm coming over from Mepis and I'm very new to Kubuntu. So far only Mepis and Kubuntu 8.10 are the only distro's that made it easy to setup my wireless card. (Dell Wireless 1490)

I have a 10GB fat32 partition that I store music on. In Mepis KDE3 I could just right click the desktop and setup a shortcut to it. I'm totally baffled in KDE4. All I want to accomplish is to setup an automount partition with a desktop shortcut.

Any suggestions?

[dibl]

Re: Help with desktop partition mount

Ehhh, we're all getting used to KDE4 and "plasma" -- no guarantees. But here's how I'd approach it.

First, you need to set the FAT32 partition to be automounted in your /etc/fstab file. That's kind of a subject unto itself, and there are lots of examples if you search the forum. Basically you need to make a directory /media/music, and then you need to add a line like this in fstab, and assuming your FAT32 partition happens to be /dev/sdb2:

/dev/sdb2 /media/music  vfat auto,users,rw,exec,noatime 0   2

So, assuming that is working, then you want a desktop link. Of course, the trick here is that KDE4 has banished the traditional GUI desktop. Do you have the "Folder View" widget enabled in KDE4? That is a darker blue rectangle that sits on the swirly blue background. If you don't, right-click the swirly blue stuff, choose "Add Widget" and browse the list, until you find "Folder View" and choose that. Then you're going to right-click it and figure out how to get it to show the "Desktop" folder, which actually lives in your /home/ICMike folder.

OK, if you get that far, then what you're looking for is a symlink to your FAT32 partition. Open Dolphin, which should open to your /home/ICMike folder. Push that window to the left of your screen, and click the "Desktop" folder to open it. Now open another instance of Dolphin, and push that window to the right, so you can see both Dolphin windows. In the one on the right, click the red "Root" folder, browse to /media and open that folder, so it is showing your media partitions. "Music" should appear there if you made it like I described above. Just click and drag it over to the open Desktop folder in the left Dolphin window, and choose "Link Here" and it will put a symlink in your desktop folder. That symlink will also appear on the "Desktop" folder view/widget on your screen, and that's how you can quickly open your music folder.

Good luck!

[ICMike]

Re: Help with desktop partition mount

I had edited my fstab but never knew about adding that folder name to my /media folder.

All works. Thanks.