[Novalug] Writing to a thumb drive

cmhowe@patriot.net cmhowe@patriot.net
Sat May 29 16:41:48 EDT 2010


List,

This is a Charlie the Perpetual Newbie type question.

As I wrote a few days ago, installing Lucid on the computer I call "black"
seemed to be great at the installfest on Friday night, May 19, but mostly
has turned bad. The most annoying -- crippling, really -- thing is that
connectivity is VERY slow. I go to my home page, which is Slashdot. It
says it's loading, but nothing shows up, so I go to another site. Same
deal. And a third. Same. Then I go back to the home page. Maybe Slashdot
shows up. If it does, I read it. If not, I go watch TV or start reading.
It can take a half hour ... One other thing is that when I am in a
terminal and want to print something out, it says that the scheduler is
messed up. I haven't tried printing an oo document.

It should be noted that I went to the installfest wanting a tuneup, not to
get Lucid installed. I did that the day before, using DSL, which took a
LONG time. More to the point, there was ominous stuff written to the
screen, stuff that I didn't have the foggiest about -- so...

What to do about it? Unless somebody will rescue me, I plan on wiping out
what I have and reinstalling. (I now have a DVD with Lucid on it.) But
before I do that, I want to write stuff I have created over the last few
months to a thumb drive. I bought one from Microcenter that has a capacity
that is a bit less than two gigabytes. I stick in in and see a nice
screen, one that I can navigate. But what I don't see is how to actually
write to it. I get to a subdirectory in the home partition. But nowhere do
I see how to actually write that subdirectory to the thumb drive. That is
the first thing I am asking for help on.

How would someone help me? (1) By talking me through the process. My phone
number is 703-212-4812. There is a problem with that: I am hearing
impaired and "talkthroughs" can be very frustrating, both for me and the
person giving the instructions. (2) By SSH. Jon LaBadie came to my house
twice and installed, but I didn't consolidate the procedure mentally -- my
bad. And (3) I can come to your house. I have now had cataract surgery and
wouldn't have a problem with a round trip of fifty miles, even at night.

There is one other thing I would like to accomplish. I am a committed
Ubuntu user, but I had a second hard drive installed, intending to install
Fedora on it. Any takers?

Charlie





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