Datasheet

1
First Contact
1.4 File Management
A central part of your desktop environment is a file manager application, en-
abling you easily to create, access, and manage all files on your system. Tradi-
tional file management in Linux would have been done via the command line,
requiring some deeper knowledge of several commands to list, create, delete, or
edit files and their properties. A file manager provides a graphical and more in-
tuitive way to handle these tasks. Learn more about the file managers of GNOME
and KDE in Section 3.3 on page 57 and Section 4.3 on page 78.
1.4.1 The Concept behind a Linux File System
Unlike a Windows operating system, Linux does not use drive letters. In Win-
dows, you would address the floppy drive as A:\, Windows system data is un-
der C:\, and so on. In Linux, all files and directories are located in a tree-like
structure. The topmost directory is referred to as the file system root or just /. All
other directories can be accessed from here.
The following is a short guide through the Linux file system tree, introducing the
most important directories:
/home/<username> /home holds the private data of every user who has an
account on your system. The files located here can only be modified by their
owner or the system administrator. Your e-mail directory is located here, for
example.
/media /media generally holds any type of drive except the hard drive of your
system. Your USB flash drive appears under /media once you have con-
nected it, as does your digital camera (if it uses USB) or your DVD or CD
drive. As soon as the data source is disconnected (think of an USB flash
drive or your camera), the respective directory under media is removed
as well.
/usr/share/doc Under /usr/share/doc, find any kind of documentation
on your Linux system and the installed packages. The manual subdirectory
holds a digital copy of this manual as well as the Administration Guide and
the release notes of the installed version of SUSE LINUX. The packages
directory holds the documentation included in the software packages.
/windows If you have both MS Windows and Linux installed on your ystem,
this is where you find the MS Windows data.
15SUSE LINUX