Linux and Ubuntu

File Systems

When I was just getting to know Linux and how to install them, the first thing that absolutely overwhelmed me was the concept of its file system. To further add to the confusion, if you do online search Linux file system are commonly referring to two different things i.e.
(i) how your partition is formatted (e.g. in Windows it can be FAT, FAT32 or NTFS), and
(ii) the directory structure (e.g. in Linux /home, /boot and etc.)

I’ll focus more the second item due to the fact most people who’s coming from Windows environment would easily understand the first item, and to avoid confusion I’ll refer it as virtual file system.

Table below shows available Linux file systems. It may vary, depending on the distro, as directories may be left out or added. One thing to note that the “/” is called the root directory and will be the parent directory of all other directories listed below if Linux is installed in a single partition method.

/	/bin	/boot	/dev	/etc
/home	/initrd	/lib	/lost+found	/media
/mnt	/opt	/proc	/root	/usr
/var	/srv	/tmp

 

Partition

Coming from a long-time Windows user, switching to Linux proved to be a daunting task even for an uber user-friendly distribution such as Ubuntu. While there’s tons of documentations and guides to linux and its distribution, most of them seems to assume you know a few things about the OS right away.

Take Ubuntu installation for an example, as you reach the point where you need to create a partition for root and so on, they just tell you to do so without even telling what it for or why there’s so many option to create a partion.