James Wilkinson wrote:
James McKenzie wrote:I thought that FHS was addressing this 'descrepency' by adding /media for media mount points, again leaving /mnt for those devices that 'disconnect' such as tape drives (btw, who uses a tape drive on a small system these days?)
/media is File Hierarchy Standard compliant. /mnt is depreciated (means no longer supported). But you should be able to create /mnt mount points if you feel more comfortable with them. I have not installed FC3, yet, but I think that I can get used to using /media vice /mnt.
I don't think /mnt is deprecated as such.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, Unix machines tended not to have CD drives or floppy drives. And many Unix computers with floppies tend not to put filesystems on them.
If you wanted to get data onto or off a Unix computer, you used a tape. And you do *not* want to try putting a filesystem on a tape -- not when the seek time can be measured in *hours*.
/mnt was specified as a generic place to "temporarily" mount filesystems.
That changed. Unixes gained the ability to mount CDs and (often) floppies, and got /cdrom, /floppy, and similar mount points. But Linux on multi-boot computers started getting /dos1, /dos2, and similar mountpoints as well, and it all became a muddle. So, as I recall, Red Hat started placing all these mount points under /mnt. And Red Hat-based Linux distros (notably SuSE and Mandrake) followed suit. Slackware and Debian along with the BSDs and others didn't.
So began a flame war that earlier versions of the FHS and the FSSTND (its predecessor) ignored (or took no position on).
/media is an attempt at a compromise: it is the old Red Hat /mnt renamed, leaving /mnt free as a "Mount point for a temporarily mounted filesystem".
James.
Anyway, adding this after years of /mnt can and does lead to confusion. Of course you can always move the associated devices back over to /mnt from /media. Again, this can lead to other headaches.
James McKenzie
