--- Russell Dyas <russell.dyas@limehursthigh.leics.sch.uk> wrote:

Next question how to write to a CD-R.

You can do this the easy way, or the hard way. Let's assume the easy way. I would imagine that (being Mandrake) you won't have to worry about the kernel. You'll be using kernel 2.6 anyway, which means things are slightly simplified. You've mentioned you use KDE -- there's a nice [1] GUI front-end to buring CDRs and CRWs called "k3b". If it's not installed already, you should install it. The act of burning a CDR[W] is done in two stages. The first is to create an ISO. Essentially, an ISO is a "container" for all the files that you want to appear on the CD, in a format that the CDR will eventually understand. AFAIK, k3b allows you to create ISOs as well as burning them to the CD. Once you've done that, you then have to tell k3b the location of the created ISO, and that you wish to burn it to the CD. I know I'm being vague, but the k3b interface is generally intuitive enough. It might also pay you to read a little more about the art of CD-burning: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO.html If you're curious.

And the second question how to access usb memory sticks.

You plug the USB memory stick in, essentially. :) Hotplug, which is the program [2] responsible for recognising peripheral devices. As soon as you plug in a USB memory stick, what'll happen (or ideally what should happen) is that hotplug'll recognise the fact you have inserted a USB device and load the correct kernel modules. So the question therefore now is: "How do I *mount* the device, so I can read/write data from it?" I'm assuming that the filesystem on this memory stick is vfat (i.e. it can be read/written to from Windows as well?) If so, you generally have to mess around with permissions (I'll come to that in a moment.) First thing is to setup a mount-point for it. As user "root", you'll want to run the following: mkdir /memorystick (or some other suitable name.) This'll be the location of the mount-point allowing you to see the files on the device. Thwe real command to make everything work, to mount the device, etc, is done like this: mount /dev/sda1 /memorystick -o uid=$USER,gid=users,dmask=007,fmask=117 There's a few thing to note here. The first one, is that your memorystick might not be at "/dev/sda1". You can usually ascertain where it is by looking at the output from the command "dmesg | less" -- which, if you view it shortly after plugging in the memory stick, is usually at the very end. So you can change that first parameter as appropriate. The second thing to note is all of the (non too-obvious) options after "-o". These are rather important. The assumption here is that you're using vfat on the memorystick. That means the filesystem won't understand the UNIX permissions model. What usually happens is that it fails silently. So all of the options you see after "-o" are to ensure that the files mounted on the pendrive "appear" to have the correct permissions, as if they were on a UNIX filesystem of some kind. The first option: uid=$USER you should change to the username of the person that is most likely going to be accessing the drive. If it is "root" then fair enough, but I'm well known for not liking such things. :P You can probably leave the GID as it is. Although it is often easier to create a "usb" group, and add all the users into it that are wanting to mount the memorystick, and then set: GID=usb Assuming that works, and you want to make it more permenant, you can add (more or less verbatim) that line to /etc/fstab, something like: /dev/sda1 /memorystick auto uid=$USER,gid=users,dmask=007,fmask=117 0 0 (that is all on one line.) I could be wrong about all of this, and it could be that as soon as you plug the USB stick into your computer, Mandrake does all of this for you and you won't have to worry about any of it. :) -- Thomas Adam. [1] That's left heavily open to interpretation, of course. [2] It's actually more than one program. ___________________________________________________________ How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com