On Monday 26 September 2005 08:07, Theo Schmidt wrote:
John O'Hagan schrieb:
There seem to be (say) three generations of USB mounting systems:
1) The good old way: USB partitions showed up in /proc somewhere, e.g.
/proc/partitions and one had to write an entry line in /etc/fstab and
then mount manually as root or create a desktop icon which mounts and
opens the device in konqueror. Problem: the partition labels change with
different devices, so you need to either do a bit of detective work
occasionally or maintain a whole zoo of /etc/fstab entries. (Completely
manual mounting without going through /etc/fstab often doesn't work
because often the file system type is unknown. In this case the only
thing I have found which will even find the partition is QTparted, a
super partitioning tool which is unfortunately incomplete and buggy and
no longer maintained or even part of Debian, as far as I can tell.)
If you want to have specific devices shown as specific nodes in /dev, you can
use hotplug and define some rules. And no, afaik, hotplug is _not_ obsolete.
2) The semiautomatic way: detective work as above in 1), then use pmount
/dev/sd<xy>. Device will show up in /media/sd<xy> and even on the
desktop if you have "show devices" activated in KDE. Problem: needs a
modern kernel.
Correct, but to get new features (and unfortunately auto-mounting of
usb-devices is relatively new to most linux-distributions, including debian)
you need to use new software. In that case an up2date kernel. (Although even
2.6.8 from Sarge would suffice)
3) The modern way: device icon appears automatically (unmounted) on
desktop. Clicking mounts it in Konqueror. Right-clicking allows safe
removal. Problem: requires modern kernel and lots of other things. Only
few distributions (e.g. Kunbuntu) seem to have gotten this right,
certainly not Sarge.
You're right. KDE starting from 3.4.0 supports this, but it didn't make it
into sarge. Although it's just your 2) + a nice GUI to handle it. It has some
points i dislike:
a) no automounting, you still need to mount the device. Fine if you're using
only kde-apps, but annoying for those who want to store a file from
OpenOffice, Mozilla or whatever on the USB-Device. They've to open the
directory in Konqueror, first.
b) mountpoints are related to the devicenode, not to the label of the
partition (like gnome-volume-manager and pmount-hal do)
I note that even 3) isn't true automounting, so maybe there is a 4).
Yes there is.
The IMHO optimal solution is to combine hal (for detecting new attached
devices), pmount (for auto-mounting without being root) and a nice
userspace-programm like GVM which starts the right program for the right
medium (xine for VCD, Konqueror for Data-CD, USB-Stick, USB- or
Firewire-Harddrive). Right now, gnome-volume-manager does this job quite
nice. Unfortunately, g-v-m has nautilus hardcoded as filemanager, which makes
it a suboptimal choice for KDE-Users.
I wrote my own scripts (python) which do at least the auto-mounting thing
using pmount-hal. If you're interested, inform me. Although you should know
that i don't continue development of them nor are they really finished. But
they "just work".
Regards
Roman