Drives and Folders
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The folder structure and names of drives in Freespire are quite different from how things work on other operating systems. We'll explain how it works here. It isn't difficult, it's just different than you're used to.
Drive Naming
Once you go browsing, things might look a little bit different than you're familiar with. First of all, you see the "location:"-bar saying things like "media:/hda2". The way Freespire works with drives is quite different from how Microsoft Windows does it. You'll get used to this quickly but it does take some getting used to.
You're probably used to the "C:, D:, E:" notation for your drive. Normal harddisks in Freespire are hda1, hda2, hdb1, hdb2, etc. It's made up of "hd"; implying a harddisk, then an "a, b, c, d" which says which harddisk you are referring to. The "a" would be the first drive, then comes "b", then "c", then "d". It's not actually always counting harddisks you have, but how you hook them up to your computer. So if you have one harddisk and one CD-ROM, quite likely they'll be called hda1 and hdc1.
Now, what's the 1 in hda1 you are wondering? You can split up one harddisk in smaller parts. These parts are called "logical drives" or "partitions", which is nice to remember if you try to impress someone or if someone is trying to impress you! This is exactly the same as it is with other operating systems, they just call the second partition on the first harddisk "D:", instead of "hda2".
The Folders
The upper-most folder on your system is the "/" folder, this is called the root-folder.
The most important folder for you is the "/home" folder. This is the folder that holds the personal files of the users of the system.
The "/root" folder stores the personal files of the root-user or administrator.This is the person who administers the computer.See Understanding Sudo/root access.
The "/mnt" folder is special as well. As we wrote above drives aren't called C: and D: but hda1 and hda2 and such. You'll browse to those drives using the "My Computer" or "File manager" icons at first.In "/mnt" there will be links to your drives, like for example: /mnt/hda2 (D:), /mnt/hdc1 (the first cd-drive) and /mnt/removable, /mnt/usbhome or /mnt/sda1 for a USB key or removable disk. It's far easier to use the "My Computer" icon.
Folder you might use at one point in the future:
/home - personal files of the users, you'll use this all the time
/mnt - the place to find links to your drives
/etc - the place Freespire stores quite a few configuration file
/root - personal files of the root-user (administrator)
