By far the best and most fluid feature of Ubuntu 7.10 is the ability to read and write to NTFS drives. What does that mean?  It means that you can share resources and use both drives as one!  You can share documents and settings between windows seamlessly.  You have one bookmarks file, one addressbook, one Documents directory.  Here’s how to set it up.

If it isn’t obvious to you already, you can have all your bookmarks, documents, mp3s, extensions, and options that you configure in Windows appear in Ubuntu and vice versa! You won’t have to spend extra time trying to copy and transfer files and folders and settings back and forth!

The first step is to mount the Windows drive.  To do this, go to Places – Computer and you will see the Windows Drive.  If you double-click the drive, it will be automatically mounted and a shortcut placed on your desktop.  (WARNING:  I royally screwed up these screenshots….ROYALLY!  I apologize in advance.)

If you browse the disk you will see your Windows Partition.  It’s that easy. You can drag and drop, copy, transfer, do whatever you like.  Seamlessly!

Now, here’s the tricky part….to get the OS and the programs to use the same folders etc.  It’s actually pretty simple, I’ll cover the basics so that you get an idea of how to do it and then you can run with it.

Firstly, for the Documents directory, browse to the UBUNTU profile.  Delete the Documents folder.  That’s right….delete it. (Please don’t leave your files in there….back them up first.)  Then browse to the Windows Documents and Settings Profile that you wish to use.  You can even use the All Users profile and when you see My Documents right click on the folder and select Make Link.  Now take this link and drop it in your UBUNTU Profile where your Documents folder was.

You now should have a My Documents shortcut in your Ubuntu profile.  Rename this shortcut to Documents (with a capital D).

What we have just done is “link” the Windows My Documents directory to Ubuntu.  If you launch Open Office go to Tools – Options and select the Paths option.  Click Edit and navigate to your Ubuntu Profile and Select your Documents Folder.  Click OK. (remember…..your UBUNTU Documents folder is really the Windows My Documents folder so you have all your files in one place!)

If you select File – Open it will default to your My Documents folder!  If you save it will save there by default as well!

This holds true for all other applications as well, just use the same technique to share the resource!

For Firefox, launch the Profile Manager by opening Terminal and typing;

firefox -profilemanager

The easiest way is to create a New Profile and click Choose Folder. 

Browse to your Firefox Folder on your Windows Partition which is located at C:Documents and Settings[User Name]Application DataMozillaFirefoxProfiles on Windows XP/2000 or C:Users[User Name]AppDataRoamingMozillaFirefoxProfiles on Windows Vista.  Click the Open button.

When you’re taken back to the Profile Manager, select the new profile that you just made, and start Firefox. If you check the Don’t ask at startup option, Firefox will always use that profile as the default one.

Of course, as it stands now, we have not set the Windows drive to be automounted every time UBUNTU starts.  There are several ways to do this by editing /etc/fstab and setting the Windows Partition to automount.

That’s all there is to it!  You can remap and use the same technique for any folder you may need!

Tags | General, Linux, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Windows Vista, Windows XP