Subject: Re: Working on Linux
From: Christoph Amelung <christoph.amelung@cern.ch>
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 12:00:03 +0200 (CEST)
To: Kevan Hashemi <hashemi@brandeis.edu>

Dear Kevan,

Linux's philosophy is: if you do not know how to access the USB stick, you are 
not worthy of accessing it  ;-) 

It depends very much on your Linux version and even on the window manager that 
you use. 

On my office PC, when I plug in the USB stick, a subdirectory "USB_DISK"  
appears in the directory /media after a few seconds. I mount it using 

mount /media/USB_DISK

and then I can access the files on the stick in the directory /media/USB_DISK.

Depending on the stick, USB_DISK could as well be spelled usbdisk or anything 
similar.

Alternatively, I can mount the stick by

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

(check that a directory /mnt exists, if not, create it - you have to be
superuser for this and for executing the mount command; sda1 stands for the
first SCSI disk in your PC [USB sticks conventionally pretend to be SCSI
disks]; on my private PC at home, for instance, the built-in harddisk is a SCSI
disk, and thus the USB stick has to be accessed as sda2 instead).

and then access the files in the directory /mnt.

I have seen some window managers where - very much like on a Mac or under 
Windows - an icon appeared on the desktop or in the subdirectory of a desktop 
icon representing the USB stick. Since I do not use such window managers I 
cannot help you much with these...

Cheers
Christoph