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I’m trying Ubuntu again, as I’m sick of Vista and Windows 7 doesn’t look much better (although I am dual-booting for games). It still just doesn’t seem suitable for a user with advanced Windows knowledge but only intermediate Linux experience. Some things just don’t work out of the box, which is fine except that finding the solution usually involves googling the answer rather than searching through the config menus or hitting F1.

Case in point is auto-mounting NTFS partitions. I know that Ubuntu automatically mounts the partitions in the Places menu when you select them, but I’ve set /var/www to be a symlink to a folder in /media/sda4 (an NTFS partition that I also use in Windows) which means that Apache fails until /media/sda4 is manually mounted. Ubuntu’s built-in help system isn’t any help, searching for ‘automount’ yields a page about Gnome Display Manager and some date format thingy.

Make Tech Easier – How To Auto-mount Your NTFS Partition In Ubuntu contains the correct instructions but basically you need the Storage Device Manager. Open a terminal:

sudo apt-get install pysdm

Once that’s installed, under System/Administration is the Storage Device Manager. It’s not the nicest app (the UI could use some work, like adding the type and partition size to the list of partitions) but it gets the job done and is much easier than editing .init files or whatever.

I’ll leave the Ubuntu vs Windows rant for another day… till then sticking to Ubuntu…