Tim: >> No, I'm saying that dynamically connected things don't have an entry >> written for them in the fstab file, automatically. Additional to that, >> you wouldn't mount them in that abbreviated manner, manually. Marko Vojinovic: > No? And what service provides automatic mounting (in runlevel 3, no X active)? There wasn't one. > And what if automounter doesn't work as expected? You're equally up the creek without a paddle. This situation is not good, and you're not the first to complain about it. I haven't seen a decent suggestion about resolving it. I've seen comments to use gnome-mount, which as we both feel, sounds silly. Not to mention being yet another thing to learn, and a convoluted thing, at that. And I've seen arguments on both sides as to whether a text only mode should have an automounter. Myself, I feel that if you've plugged a flashdrive into the socket, you want to use it. Why should you have to play the role of the computer to mount it? Yes, I see the need in proper dismounting before an unplug, but there's a world of difference between a simple "dismount flashdrive" command and a varying "mount /dev/variable-name ..." command. > I plug in my USB flash memory, kernel detects it, udev creates /dev/sdb for > it, and that's it. There is nothing in /media, nothing in /mnt. I have to su > to root, and manually mount it via > > # mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /some/directory > > which of course works, but is a pain since only root has privileges for > accessing the data. A difficulty with this, that you'd otherwise put entries into the fstab file, is that you can't always predict which device a removeable drive will be found at. You might have two drives, that aren't always used. Today your flashdrive might be /dev/sdb tomorrow it could be /dev/sdc. The move towards drive labels avoids that issue. But it's a right nightmare to add a label to a Microsoft filesystem on Linux. > So what is the name of the daemon that should do all this > for me? (it doesn't seem to work properly, so I need to tweak with it...) Last I looked into it, it was some interaction between HAL and either Gnome or KDE. >> or you can use gnome-mount to get it work out the details. > Well, I tried something like > > $ gnome-mount --device /dev/sdb > > and the first thing it did was to complain that there is no X running (!!), > than it falls back to text-mode, complains that it cannot find any partitions > on /dev/sdb, and fails. It does not detect the filesystem, it does not read > off the label, it does not create a mount point. Shouldn't that be something like sdb1 rather than just sdb? > But I think that the fault is in hal not providing appropriate info for it, > since "lshal | grep sdb" returns nothing. Hal does not seem to have detected > the flash memory, so gnome-mount knows nothing about it. Just to muddy the waters, there's been a bit of an ongoing issue with udev and USB devices lately. Some people have been unable to mount things. I think it must be hardware dependent, as I don't have those problems (currently). >> I haven't quite got around to looking at manual mounting on FC7, it's >> working automatically for me, quite fine. >> I think you might want to have a look at man gnome-mount > Besides from not being intended for direct usage, I get the feeling that it > simply does not work properly without Gnome running. It reads settings from > gconf (which may not exist) Yes, I don't think much of things that rely on gnome-something (gconf, etc.), when Gnome shouldn't be a requirement. I've been right peeved at gconf, just lately, trying to sort out a keyboard issue. That's something that I don't think should be handled by gconf. > All in all, I believe the culprit is hal in this particular case. But how do I > get it to work? I think you need to look into how to make HAL rules. It's changed a lot since the last time I looked at that (I had to fiddle around to get a digital camera mounted to read its files - that was a nightmare). But I still feel that the user shouldn't have to go around modifying HAL rules for something as commonplace as a flash drive. > Of course, I can always edit /etc/fstab and put in appropriate data by hand, > and this will work, but that is a workaround, not a solution, right? I tend to agree. You paint yourself into a corner trying to write fixed rules for non-fixed media. -- (This box runs FC5, my others run FC4 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
