[NTLUG:Discuss] (k)ubuntu 7.10 gutsy gibbon and usb drives

[Patrick R. Michaud]

At today's meeting there was a question posed about the
new 7.10 release of Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon) and reading usb
drives.  I thought I'd report back with my brief experiences...

Tonight I loaded Kubuntu 7.10 onto my Dell Latitude X300 notebook;
installation proceeded smoothly without any difficulties.  I did
various updates and then tried two usb disk devices -- a
1GB Patriot usb flash disk and a 160GB WD Passport usb external
hard drive -- Kubuntu found and mounted both of these drives
without any apparent difficulty.

The 1GB usb flash disk is formatted as vfat; I have the 160GB WD
Passport partitioned and formatted with ext3.  I know that the question 
today was also about mounting ntfs volumes under (k)ubuntu 7.10 -- but 
I don't have any ntfs filesystems to test with.  

Sometime over the next couple of days I will probably load Kubuntu
7.10 onto my desktop machine and see how it fares.  My first
impression of 7.10 is that it's a bit cleaner from a system
setup and configuration perspective than 7.04 was.  In particular,
I was able to pair my bluetooth phone much more quickly and easily
with 7.10 than I was with 7.04.

Hope this helps,

Pm