Accessing other hard drives at boot up

Linux Mint will automatically mount other hard drives when you click on their partitions in the File Manager.
What if you want to access those drives on boot up without having to access the File Manager first? It's easily fixed!

You just need to add them to the /etc/fstab file
Run the following command in a terminal:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab

The gedit editor opens with fstab loaded.
Add a new line to end of the file:
/dev/sdb1 /media/D ntfs defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0 0
(/dev/sdb1 = physical drive) (/media/D = Folder where to mount drive) Do this for each drive you want to add.
Save and close the file. The drives will be loaded automatically at next boot.
The first part (/dev/sda1) is the actual physical disk. You can get this information by looking in the Disk Utility program.
The second part (/media/WindowXP) is the folder you want it be mounted to. Use /media but change the WindowsXP part to anything you want.
The remainder tells Linux what type of files system (Windows disks are typically ntfs) and some other stuff you don't need to worry about.
Note: If it is not a Windows disk then you will need to google what parameters to use.

Running Windows programs under Linux

I have had success running various Windows applications (mostly games) under Linux using the software called 'Wine'.
To install Wine, run the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.5

Then to run a Windows application I recommend doing so from a terminal window as any errors can be seen and 'googled' for a fix.
So for example to run Microsoft Word, change to the directory containing the word.exe and run the command:
wine word.exe

If any errors are displayed then you need to google them and apply the recommended fix.

So, as you can see to run a Windows program just requires prefixing it with 'wine' first.