What happened to my C: drive?
Most of my readers will be using Windows. Before I made the switch to Linux I used it as well. Not to date myself to much but, my first PC ran Dos. So at a very early age i learned the basic Dos commands.
The first one that I leaned was “dir” so naturally in the Linux terminal I tried it and got “bash: dir: command not found”. After some research I learned that the same command in Linux is “ls” or list directory contents. Another command I knew was cd or change directory. This command was the same in Linux and in Dos. I wanted to know where all my Linux programs were so I started to explore the disk. For those of you who have never used Dos, in windows it’s kind of like using the Windows explorer.
This is where things got very confusing to me. My disk was cut up into different directories, and they had weird names like this.
/bin - The bin directory contains some of the common applications for all users as well as the system.
/boot- This is the place where the Linux kernel is saved.
/dev- Think of this directory as the device manager, but one neat thing about this is hard drives are files.
/etc- In this directory you will find the configuration files for the programs that run.
/home- Each user will have files here and this would be like your My Document in Windows.
/lib- In Windows most of the system dll’s are stored in Windows system 32. This directory would be like that.
/lost+found- If you have a system crash and files are restored, this is where you will find the original pieces.
/mnt- Here you will find your drives.
/opt- Lets say you install FireFox. This is where it would be placed.
/proc- I don’t want to bore you with the details of this directory, its technically heady.
/root- The root user is so special that he doesn’t get to be in the /home directory, think royal palace.
/usr- This is sort of like the windows Program Files directory.
/var- This is where you will find the log files, databases, and web servers.
This post just barely scratches the surface, but I know that this will help you as you transition into the Open Source world.
