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I have a partition named Storage which is used by both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 where I have my music, videos, pictures and downloads. I'd like to have the sidebar icons with these same names (eg. Music, Pictures, etc.) on Ubuntu link to the folders in Storage with the same name rather than Home/Music etc.
The problem is that I am super new to Ubuntu, I've been researching and i think it has to do with editing ~/.config/user-dir.dirs but i have no idea how to navigate to this location, much less how to edit the file.

2 Answers 2

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Probably the simplest way for you could be this:

  1. When you're in your home folder where you see "Documents", "Music", "Pictures" and "Video" in Nautilus, press F3 which will switch to dual-pane mode.
  2. Go to the other pane and click on the "Storage" partition to open it and make sure you have the same folder names there.
  3. Now go back to the first pane (your home folder) and first check if these folders are empty. If they're not, move contents (select, press down Shift key, drag and drop) to the respective folders in the opposite pane (Storage). And now delete these empty folders (safer: move to trash).
  4. Now go back to the second pane (Storage), select these folders, press down Ctrl+Shift, and then drag and drop to the first pane (your home folder) to create shortcuts (symbolic links) there.

That's it. But you might also prefer to make your shared partition Storage mounted every time you login. Otherwise these links will look broken until you click and mount it. To do this you need to enter this partition in a system file called fstab like this:

  1. Enter this command in Terminal (entering your login password when asked): sudo gedit /etc/fstab
  2. In this file add a line similar to the one below (assuming your partiton is in ntfs format, merely entering your partition uuid number instead of the example) at the end of the list:

    UUID=5D07479B6A5F6512 /media/Storage ntfs-3g defaults,nls=utf8,uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=027,fmask=137 0 0

You can get your partition uuid with this terminal command: **ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid** Or you can start GParted, select the partition and then "Information" from the context menu.

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Another - More GUI - Way is using the Ubuntu Tweak tool to specify custom locations for those user folders. To install, you need to enter the following commands (typing your login password when asked) in Terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak

Then start Ubuntu Tweak, go to Admins and then User Folder. There you can select each user folder, click Change button at the bottom, and select the folder you want.

After this you might also prefer mounting the Storage partition each time you login by modifying the system file fstab as described in my first answer.

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  • Thank you very much!...just got to try this today and worked perfect....tyvm
    – AbuZahra
    Feb 18, 2013 at 18:41
  • You're welcome... Would you like to mark one as the answer to your question then? Because many people don't do this, increasing number of unanswered questions do not reflect the reality...
    – Sadi
    Feb 18, 2013 at 19:44

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