mount.app - the mount maker

** Copyright (C) 1998 Steve Borho <steve@borho.org>
**
** This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
** it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
** the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
** (at your option) any later version.
**
** This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
** but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
** MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
** GNU General Public License for more details.
**
** You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
** along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
** Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Frequently Asked Questions:
===========================

1.  What the hell is a mount point and why do I give a damn?

Unix systems do not use drive letters to identify devices.  Instead, they
uses the idea of a root partition and mounted filesystems.

Your root partition is the disk partition (drive portion) which holds the
root directory of your filesystem (ie, the "/" directory).  

NOTE: Did I mention that Unix likes it's slashes forward?  You'll have to
get used to it, but it's a much saner choice than "\" since the backslash
is an escape character to C and other languages.

In the DOS world, the equivalent to the root directory would be "C:\".
This hasn't changed much from DOS 1.0 up through Windows NT 4.0.  If you
have any other devices (floppies, CD's, or hard drives), they each
get their own drive letter, even network devices get drive letters.

With Unix, instead of using using drive letters, each of those devices
gets "mounted" onto a "mount point" somewhere in your filesystem.
Typically there is a subdirectory "/mnt" which holds the mount points for
many devices.  Your cdrom, for instance, will usually be mounted onto
/mnt/cdrom.


2.  So what does it mean to "mount" your cdrom onto /mnt/cdrom?

If you were to look in the directory /mnt/cdrom when your cdrom wasn't
mounted, it would be empty.  After you mount the cdrom, the directory
will hold the contents of the cdrom.  So, mounting a drive "adds" the
device's contents to your filesystem until such time as you un-mount it.

(Technically, there could have been anything in /mnt/cdrom before,
but it would have been "covered" by the cdrom filesystem while it is
mounted)


3.  Why do it that way? Just to confuse us DOS/Windows people?

No, the Unix way makes more sense.

The beauty of using mounted filesystems over drive letters is
transparency.  You can add and remove drives at will and never have to
worry about breaking existing applications.

With the drive letter model, everytime a new storage device is added to
your computer, your drive letters change.  Most software (and some
operating systems) gets confused when this happens.  You typically end up
having to re-install software every time you move a disk around.  This
catchup game gets rediculous when network drives are used.

In Unix, networked filesystems are designed in from the ground up to be
transparent to the user.  You can move applications and data around on to
any machine on the network and share them seamlessly because their
filenames and locations never have to change.

Mounted filesystems also makes it easier to scale your drive space,
because adding more drives doesn't change the existing directory
structures, giving you more control over what goes on each drive.

They are, however, a bit of a pain to deal with when using removeable
media.

4.  So you're telling me I have to mount/unmount my CDs and floppies by hand?

That's where mount.app comes in, to make it as painless as possible to
handle your removeable media and to add a few ammenities that you won't be
able to live without, like having real-time capacity statistics and
ejecting drives as you unmount them.


5.  Ok, I'm sold.  So how do I drive this thing?

Well, you've actually already figured most of it out.  Clicking on the
arrows scroll through the available mountable devices.  Clicking on the
tack will mount the drive, while clicking again unmounts.  Double clicking
on the drive icon brings up a file browser in the directory of that
device's mount point.  Double clicking on the background brings up a
configuration applet.


6.  How did this thing know what devices I have installed?

It cheated.  It looked in your computer's file system table (/etc/fstab) and
determined which devices were mountable.


7.  Ha Ha!  I love it!  It all makes sense now!  Where do I send my $15?

Keep it, baby, it's free.  Live long and happy and welcome to the open
source community.  If you want to reward me, learn all you can about Linux
and teach people who know less than you.  Hang out in the comp.os.linux.*
newsgroups and answer questions you understand.

My explanations are probably a poor substitute for the real thing.  If you
need more answers, please point your browser at http://www.linux.org

Send bug reports and comments to me, Steve Borho, at steve@borho.org
