How do I integrate my Windows filesystem with Ubuntu?

Solution 1:

Prerequisites

You have to have the Windows partition mounted in Ubuntu to make the following work .

Redirecting special folders

An equivalent of special folders (My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, etc) known from Windows folders was defined by the freedesktop.org project. The correspondig configuration file ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs is managed by the xdg-user-dirs-update command.

You could, for example, change the download directory by executing the following command in the terminal:

xdg-user-dirs-update --set DOWNLOAD /mnt/<WINDOWS_PARTITION>/users/<YOU>/Downloads

Another way to achieve the same is to manually replace $HOME/Downloads by /mnt/<WINDOWS_PARTITION>/users/<YOU>/Downloads in the configuration file (e.g. in gedit or nano).

To have the changes take effect run xdg-user-dirs-gtk-update afterwards and additionally xdg-user-dirs-update if you have edited the configuration file by hand.

Redirecting regular folders

You can also replace folders on your Ubuntu home folder with symbolic links to the folders on your Windows partition e.g.:

ln -s /mnt/<WINDOWS_PARTITION>/users/<YOU>/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/<YOUR_PROFILE.default> ~/.mozilla/firefox/<YOUR_PROFILE.default>

That is a very simple solution and it does not work for everything, it might cause issues in some cases. However some people share settings for Firefox and Thunderbird that way.

Solution 2:

Type this in terminal

gedit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

and link up to the absolute path of the windows folders. Then you can just "killall nautilus" or possibly reboot.

Solution 3:

Yes, it is possible. I don't think it will display the same way since they use different icon sets. It should however display the same files and folders you may have placed on your desktop.
The problem you will likely run into with those is that windows references those files and folders from different relative starting points. (If you click them you'll get a "File not found" error.)

If, for some reason, you wish to continue, find your Ubuntu "Desktop" folder in your home folder. Rename it to something else like "desktop.bak" so you can undo this later. Open a terminal and enter 'ln -s /path_to/windows/Desktop Desktop'

Open your home folder and click on the new Desktop link. You should see the files and folders referenced on your Windows desktop. (For curiosity's sake, try clicking on them and see if any of them work.)

You should be able to log out and back in to see what you have on your desktop. If you find this isn't what you wanted, just delete the symlinked "Desktop" and rename the "desktop.bak" to "Desktop".