Kubuntu vs. Ubuntu

[Andrew Jarrett]

On 9/15/07, msmarti58 <msmarti_a58 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >Ubuntu decided to standardize on GNOME as their desktop environment.
>
> Yes, I realize that, but they must have some other differences, since GNOME
> found my other disc drives right away, and KDE did not. I still have not
> found a way to make Kubuntu recognize those. Without it recognizing those
> other drives, it is useless to me, because those are where all my other
> files are, songs, documents, whatnot. I have three hard drives. One has
> Windows Vista on it, and is 300 gig, my old 40 gig hard drive I installed
> Ubuntu on to check it out, and the other 500 gig is an external network
> share for storage only between me and the rest of the family, no operating
> system.
>
> >If you installed the same version of each one (eg. Ubuntu Feisty vs.
> Kubuntu Feisty) then you should have had the same results with both.  Any
> difference you experienced is most likely due to something you did
> differently yourself, without being aware of it.
>
> Now, you might have something there, I'm not sure which versions I put on of
> each one. I can't look right now, I am in Vista. But still, if it was so
> simple in GNOME to locate and mount my other hard drives, then I think KDE
> should have found them too. I did nothing differently that I know of. I did
> a clean install and specified that it write over the existing 40 gig hard
> drive.
>
> Now my main question really is (since I DO like the KDE interface), HOW do I
> make it see my other drives? They are NTFS drives. Well, actually it DOES
> see them, but it says something odd like I don't have proper permission to
> open them. It says I have to have root permission, and I don't know what
> that is. I have set myself up to be administrator. I have done some reading
> on it but it was WAYYY over my head. If it's too hard to describe here, can
> someone point me to a place where it tells me what to do step by step for
> newbies like me please? :)
>
> Marti

I am assuming that you can see the drives on your desktop or in
/media.  If it won't let you open the drives because it is set up for
root access, try right-clicking and checking out the file permissions
by clicking on properties or some such.  If it won't let you change
the file permissions, I am not sure of a newbie friendly (read: non
command line) way to change that but someone else here might be able
to help.

A little bit about root:
There is a user account on every linux system that is called root.
This is the "god" of the system and can do anything that it wants to
whether it is fixing or destroying it.  In some linux distributions,
you will set up a password for the root account and use that password
to make changes to the system, but not in (k)ubuntu.  In (k)ubuntu,
there is a root account, but no one is allowed to log in as root and
there is no password for root (as in the password doesn't exist, not
that it is an empty string -> "").  (K)ubuntu users should do
everything using their password to their account, not root's.

Hope this helps,
Andrew

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