Thanks to everyone who responded to my queries. I followed your advice
and got it to work.

For the benefit of Sparky who desires to do the same with his Ubuntu
install I'll summarize what I did:

1. Create new mount points in the /mnt dir for the partitions that you
want your distro to recognize and mount. I.e. open a console as root
and enter: mkdir /mnt/name_of_partition. I did this for all the
partitions that I wanted Debian to access, i.e.

.....# mkdir /mnt/fedora
.....# mkdir /mnt/xandros2
.....# mkdir /mnt/mepis

etc. etc. as I specified in a posting above.

2. Edit /etc/fstab as root, e.g. open a console, su to root and enter
.....# nano /etc/fstab (if you have the nano editor installed)

Add the lines

/dev/hd.... /mnt/name_of_partition <filesystem type> etc. etc.

to fstab along the lines of what I did and save the new fstab.

3. Shutdown the OS and reboot. On reboot, Debian will now automount
all the partitions added to fstab (except for the ones excluded by
noauto), and you can access them in your file manager, for read at least
if not for write.

The removable media, i.e. floppy, CD-ROM, USB flashdrives etc. are a
little more complicated, and my Debian install didn't make them
available by default (note the noauto parameter for most of them in
fstab). To mount my floppy drive manually, I open a console as root and
enter

mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /media/floppy

I imagine I can mount the other removable media in an analogous fashion;
I only need to know the filesystem type which for most of them in my
system is vfat.

A remaining question for the more experienced Debian users: Is it
prudent to configure fstab to also automount the removable media at
bootup? That certainly would be convenient and potential problems can't
be great as is apparent by the fact that the Debian variants Knoppix,
Kanotix, Xandros, and Mepis all do automount these at bootup. Why
doesn't straight Debian do this as a default?

What would be your advice?

Robert