Summary

Even if you're the only user of your Red Hat Linux system, you must perform some system-administration tasks to keep the system up and running. Moreover, if your PC has a DOS partition in addition to the Linux partition, or if you work with DOS floppy disks, you may want to access the DOS files directly from Linux. This chapter provides an overview of Linux system-administration and network-administration tasks. It introduces Nautilus and shows you how to use the mtools utility programs to format and access a DOS floppy disk directly from Linux.

By reading this chapter, you learned the following:

GNOME comes with a Start Here window that enables you to perform some common system-administration tasks.
You can add new user accounts by using the Red Hat User Manager or the useradd command. To remove an account, you can either use Red Hat User Manager or the userdel command.
Linux provides built-in support for the MS-DOS file system. You can use the mount command to access a DOS partition or a DOS floppy from Linux. After mounting a DOS file system at a directory in your Linux system, you can use Linux commands such as ls and cp to manipulate the DOS files.
You can download a kernel module and load it to enable Linux to read from NTFS partitions that are used in Windows XP, 2000, and NT.
As you install Linux (following the directions in Chapter 2), you also install a set of utility programs known as mtools. The mtools programs provide a convenient way to access MS-DOS files, especially floppy disks, because you can use mtools commands without first needing to mount the floppy disk. The mtools utilities include commands such as mdir and mcopy that work the same as the DOS commands DIR and COPY.