Mounting windows disks under Linux
I followed these instructions for how to mount a FAT partition read-write for communication between Windows and Linux on my laptop. I also followed the instructions further down to mount the main windows NTFS partition read-only.
It is a pity that the Ubuntu System->Administration-Disks->Partitions GUI does not allow you to do this. THough at least I was able to use the GUI to find out the device names of my partitions.