Automounting experiments
Hi all,
There's been a lot of discussion on this list about automounting of removable
devices. I thought this might be interesting:
A while back I discovered pmount, and along with hal and udev on a 2.6.11
kernel, it worked as expected: plug in, icon appears, already mounted, no
fstab entry required. (This is on KDE 3.3.2)
Then I upgraded udev and hal, and suddenly pmount needed to be called
manually.
I emailed Martin Pitt, the author of pmount, and he explained how it is
supposed to work:
>...hotplug invokes hal, hal adds the new device to the db and sends out
>notifications, gnome-volume-manager picks it up and calls
>pmount-hal to actually mount the device....
>[...]
>However, g-v-m is certainly not the intended solution for KDE...
Which raised the question, how was it working in KDE without g-v-m, and why
did it stop on upgrade of hal and udev? And which KDE part is supposed to
listen to HAL events and call pmount-hal?
Anyway, I installed gnome-volume-manager, added it to KDE Autostart and it ran
in the background (its behaviour can be configured by running
gnome-volume-properties), automounting nicely.
On a recent upgrade to etch, I tried uninstalling g-v-m, and now found that
the automounting was again working without it.
Next upgrade of hal and udev, it stopped again; installed g-v-m, it worked,
uninstalled it again, it kept working...I think you're beginning to see the
pattern.
It seems that installing g-v-m (without necessarily keeping it) does something
to the system to enable hal to talk to pmount, and that upgrading certain
programs overwrites those changes.
If someone could figure out what those changes were, and how to make them
(optionally) permanent, KDE's device automounting would be improved.
Any thoughts?
John O'Hagan
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