Clean-Up Job, Mandriva 2007

This morning I'm about 80% of the way toward having my computer pulled back into its wonted customizations. What remains is to configure the printer; install Windows TrueType fonts (yes, I still have the Win98 license which came with this computer, even though I long since got rid of any other trace of Windows on it); and clean up a handful of minor items such as why I have no wallpaper in Fluxbox. (Answer, which I just doped out a few minutes ago: because I haven't reinstalled the Esetroot utility. Gotta find which RPM Esetroot is in.)

At first it looked as though Mandriva 2007 wasn't recognizing my zip drive, or my flash drive, or for that matter any of my USB devices. Turns out all I had to do was add a few cryptic lines to /etc/fstab, such as:

/dev/sda4 /mnt/zip vfat noauto,user,rw,exec 0 0

and voilà! Now I can mount drives from the command line at will, which never worked before, because previous releases of Mandrake/Mandriva had the bad habit of overwriting /etc/fstab with default settings every time I booted up.

Ah, the joys of Linux! As Neal Stephenson put it, "If you don't like having your choices made for you, you should start making your own."