I'm trying to set up a new PC I'm going to use as a home theater PC. It has two SATA drives - a 300GB Velociraptor that I set as the one the boot loader installed to when I did the installation, and a 2TB WD Green that I dragged over to be mounted (I thought) during the installation. I went with Fedora mainly because I'd seen this step in the installation before and thought I'd save myself the headaches of trying to have the second - 2TB - drive mount so I could use it for downloads, rip MP3s to and for AVI file storage. Dolphin doesn't show it right now. I tried the command fdisk -l in terminal but it didn't do anything. Beats me what I didn't type in correctly. su or sudo? I wanted to post as much information as possible.

I was also surprised not to find Aqualung in Fedora's repositories. (I'd only used Ubuntu and Kubuntu before this. ) I'd followed some advise I'd found on the Internet to get codecs for the Kmplayer to work with the AVI files I intend to use, along with lame and unrar, so I got some extra repositories downloaded. I'm not a real hand at compiling things, so the tar file I got from Aqualung's site isn't much use to a naive like me.

I'd used gksudo dolphin command before in Ubuntu boxes to drop the 64 bit Flash plugin into Opera, but I'm unsure of the correct way to do the same in Fedora, so I'm stuck there too.

Then, I still haven't seen the same sort of hardware driver upgrade icon pop up on this install like I've seen in Gnome desktops, which always made it a no-brainer to get the correct ATI drivers set up. This new box has a Radeon 4670 in it.

So, how the heck do I get this storage drive to mount - preferably on boot-up? Is there a repository with an easy install for Aqualung? If not (never mind answering why the hackers that are generous enough to give us Fedora don't include Aqualung in the repositories) is there a set of terminal commands anybody's posted that I could follow to get it on this new set-up?

How do I launch Dolphin in Fedora so I have privies to drop the Flash plugin I can get from Adobe into Firefox's and Opera's plugins folder?

Lastly, how can I best get the ATI drivers installed? Is the a set of terminal commands posted I can use, similar to one I found for getting it setup in an Ubuntu box?

Lastly, if any of you are out there reading this, I know I'm far from the only ignoramus who'd love to see Linux distros finally mount extra hard drives, like eSATA, as easily as Windoze will. I don't regret leaving Microsoft's offering behind - I still find it a lot more imperfect than the Linux offering I've used - but I for one am stumped as to why in these days of dirt-cheap hard drives it's still treated as the province of the hard-core to use more than one HDD in a Linux machine. It oughta be a bit easier than it is by now. (OK, 'nuf with my whining.)

Thanks a boat-load in advance to anyone who takes the time to help me out with this.

It showed you all the user-available drives - eg. none. try

sudo fdisk -l

Have you seen the fedora faq?
http://www.fedorafaq.org/f13/
... for f13, modify the url for your release.

Aqualung:
your advise is correct, if the only reason for aqualung is to get restricted multimedia functions, then you should just install the plugins for a media player that is available from the fedora repos. Use yumex to browse and familiarize yourself with what is available.

Compiling things is essential in fedora - you will just have to learn. Why did you pick fedora and not, say, Debian (which will be familiar to you)?

Dolphin:
http://forums.dolphin-emulator.com/s...d=10171&page=2

HW Drivers:
Yeah well, fedora is different - the HW drivers dialog is an ubuntu-ism.

ATI Drivers: already installed...
http://www.fedorafaq.org/f13/#radeon
... which fedora do you have? What is wrong with your radeon setup?

usually you do: sudo yum install kmod-fglrx for the evil proprietary drivers if there is an rpm for your fedora release. Avoid if at all possible.
you can probably compile the latest driver from ATI, but that is not recommended.


Automount extra HDD: this depends on the distro - Ubuntu makes additional (formatted) hdds available in a Places menu at login but many distro designers see it as a security feature that they make you edit the /etc/fstab file or whathaveyou ... something that requires admin oversight ...

Is your big drive formatted? If not, then it will not get automounted ... but will show up (as /dev/sdb probably). If it is formatted, but as NTFS, then fedora cannot read it and so will not mount it.

beware of the convenience of windows, it usually has a pitfall.

I tried sudo fdisk -l early on and it didn't show the extra drive at all under Fedora for whatever reason.

I really like Aqualung because it's the only MP3 (FLAC, etc.) player I know of that won't put pauses in between tracks while playing.

I've been trying out other distros since Ubuntu went with Unity, which I don't like nearly as much as Gnome. Then I thought I'd give KDE another try. I still prefer the simplicity of Gnome, plus don't like the way KDE doesn't seem to handle some customization as intuitively, if at all, as Gnome does.

openSUSE lost me when I simply could not get applications and plugins from the optional repositories. I kept getting the message that the server wasn't available. Fedora started to look promising to me, but even when I found threads discussing compiling Aqualung I found that people familiar with what they needed to do were still running into trouble.

So, I went back to loading Kubuntu. I can live with it on the HTPC, but I still don't like the way KDE puts anything I've used a custom icon for on the desktop into "Lost and Found" and it's losing the clip icon for video files, but those are minor irritations.

As for getting the extra hard drive to mount automatically, I found that installing and using the disk utility to first format the drive (which I thought Fedora 15 did during installation), then format and name the partition - just one as I had no intention to actually partition the drive - has it mounted automatically every time I boot up. It's nice to be able to do this in a GUI, which I thought I couldn't based on all the threads I'd found on line.

I haven't found a way to rip from RipperX or Asunder directly into a folder in the extra HDD - just to the drive itself, so I have to move my rips manually to a "Music" folder. Again, a minor irritation.

I found a pretty easy to use compilation thread to get the most up-to-date drivers for the Radeon HD 5670 installed. Still not as straight foraward as Gnome's little add-on-card-icon that'll pop up begging you to install the driver, and the package manager taking it from there, but it worked.

Anyway, I'm finally going to get my entire music collection and most of my favorite videos loaded into this thing like I wanted. (I've been collecting CDs since they first started producing them back in the early '80s.)

Thing is, I don't think I'm alone in wanting an easy to use OS - like Windows - that I don't have to constantly tend to like some suicidal psychotic teenager - like Windows. So far Ubuntu/Kubuntu has proven to be the only thing out there that fits the bill. The other distros still make it a lot more work than it should have to be to accomplish pretty mundane things. The newest Kubuntu has some quirky bugs right now. GIMP and Asunder don't launch until you switch out of Raleigh to GTK+. Once you've done that you can switch back and they still launch. Strange.

I'm thinking of trying a MythTV addition and using this thing as an OTA PVR, but that looks like it's only for people who have a lot more time to devote to hacking away than I do. Maybe using a HDHomeRun box wouldn't be a too big of a deal, but I'm not sure I want to shell out the dollars unless I know for sure I'm going to get the thing working. I'm not too shy to do some research, but I don't really have the time nor inclination to practically become a hacker just to set up a PC for the entertainment center. I already have a job and don't want another.

... thats not what you said though - you said you'd tried fdisk -l and it showed nothing ... sudo fdisk -l should show your partitions for the inatallation that is running the terminal at least. Without the sudo, the display is restricted. it should have shown your unformatted drive too - fedora won't automount an unformatted drive, or any drive with a fs it does not have a driver for (like ntfs).

You do not have to use Unity with Ubuntu
http://scottlinux.com/2011/03/05/ubu...classic-gnome/

Most media players have settings for gapless playback - important for mix albums and the like.
eg Rythmbox ... look for crossfade-tracks option in the settings.
Of course you could rip the CD to a single track and play that.

You don't install the most up to date drivers in general ... you normally don't need them - especially if your card is supported by a free-software driver.

People who like the ease of Ubuntu but don't like the Ubuntu way often like Mint.

I'll check them out, Simon. I saw something about setting up Ubuntu for Gnome but worried I'd run into some odd behavior I had some time back when I tried installing the option to use KDE or Gnome. Probably the fault was on my end, but I just went back rather than fix what really wasn't broke to begin with.

I remember using sudo or su because I didn't get anything, but after reading your post I'm unsure if I was thinking about something else where I had to get root privileges to get something to fly. Anyway, I think I'm going to stay with what I pretty much know. I've been using Ubuntu since version 7.10 and it doesn't look like it'd be worthwhile to get over the learning hump all over again with others.

I may try Mint in the future like you suggested, though. I saw it's also a Debian-based OS so I'd probably find it a lot more familiar than Red Hat derivatives. Thanks for the advice.

Gnome comes with Ubuntu - it is already installed, it just isn't the default.
Mint tends to be more sanguine about proprietary extras and tends not to mess much with the user experience - you'll find it very familiar compared with the redhat stuff for sure.