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 no longer maintained or even part of Debian, as far as I can tell.)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 -- If only you and dead people can read hex, how many people can read hex?
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