On 02-Jun-03 Tom Emerson wrote:
[...] [and later on in this thread it was pointed out that "local users" means "secretaries and the like"] In my opinion, about all a secretary would need to know about "/dev" *might* be the fact that the floppy and CD-rom drives are referenced against this instead of things like "A:" and "D:", and this is only in the case when the automount service fails and the secretary is forced into "some form of command line" to enter a "mount" command. (I say "only when automount fails" because for the most part, the system WILL mount the "drives" in an equally cryptic, but certainly more recognizable name, like /media/floppy...)
I have found that it works well, for users habituated to Windows/DOS, to set up mount-points called /A:, /B:, /C:, /D:, etc., with corresponding entries in /dev/fstab, so that (for instance) /dev/hda3 is automounted on /C: /dev/hdb2 is automounted on /D: entering the command "mount /A:" mounts floppy drive 1 on /A: etc. That way, users have the feeling of "familiar territory" and can read the road signs in the way they are used to. So they can (from CLI or a grahpical navigator) cd to /C:/My_Documents/... They don't need to know what the system really calls them. Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 02-Jun-03 Time: 09:13:40 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------