On ו', 2005-11-25 at 01:49 +0200, Aviram Jenik wrote:
> The KDE "media" tab works sometimes, but does not unmount, and is hard to 
> understand and use.
> 
> The best case scenario is an MS Windows-like popup when the diskonkey is 
> inserted, with an auto unmounting when the usb stick is taken out.

The modern "automounter" utilizes two technologies -- HAL and D-BUS.

Some technical mumbo-jumbo:
- HAL keeps track of the inserted devices, figures out what kind of
device it is (disk-on-key), whether/where/how it should be mounted
(probably /media/volume_label but it's a configurable policy).
Eventually, it keeps a picture of the system's current hardware state,
similar to Windows 2000 Device Manager. You can run 'hal-device-manager'
to see it graphically.
- D-BUS allows HAL to dispatch a message to every user's desktop when
the new device is inserted/removed.

>From there, it's your desktop environment's responsibility to do
something with those messages. KDE uses HAL if you the "HAL" checkbox in
Control Center | Peripherals | Storage Media | Advanced is enabled (it
is, by default). GNOME's Volume Manager automatically mounts, puts
device icons on your desktop and makes the devices available in File
Dialogs etc. Maybe you can make KDE do the same by tweaking options in
this Control Center screen.

On removal of the device, HAL should emit a message about it and an
unmount should occur.

> I believe Ubuntu has something like that (can somebody confirm?). I'll switch 
> to Ubuntu if I have to, but I'd rather understand how it works and duplicate 
> this behavior under Debian.

You can duplicate this on Debian by installing HAL, preferably from
'unstable' (since this is a fresh technology which changes and improves
often). Yes, HAL/D-BUS are still pre-1.0, but they're already used "in
production" in Fedora Core 4 and other distros.

> STFW didn't produce anything beyond the standard non-GUI automounting 
> utilities with tons of scripts to tweak it.

HAL and the rest of the infrastructure are non-GUI. The GUI is expected
to be delivered by every HAL/D-BUS-compliant desktop environment, and
both GNOME and KDE comply.


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