setting up udev

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 3:45 pm

I recently performed a fresh install on my kid's new pc and went for Debian testing.
One thing I noticed is that when he inserts something like a usb pen he's immediately offered the choice of dynamically mouting the device (or do nothing).
This tell sme that udev is probably working right on his box.
Some time ago I read on a debian mailing list that udev was broken in "unstable" and therefore not working correctly so I never bothered and mounted everything manually like I'd always done.

Since I'm now updating from testing instead of unstable, I upgraded udev, discover and hal but it's still not working dynamically like it even does on my wife's FC3 box.
So I wondered what I would heve to do to have udev dynamically managing my devices like it does on every other box but mine?

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 4:58 pm

Got it working to the point where udev automagically creates an fstab entry and offers to mount my drive in a konqueror window.
Only there's no option to unmount the usb drives once I'm finished so I still have to look up the device number and unmount it as root.

Now on all the "other" boxen

there's a nice icon popping up and when you right-click it you can unmount from there.
Any ideas on how to achieve this?
pmount is installed, also tried usbmount without success.

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 7:09 pm

I am pretty sure (not 100%) that this is a function of the hal daemon. Do you have it installed and the hal daemon service running? Then again it may be "gnome-volume-manager" or "gnome-mount" or both, or a combination of all. Who the heck knows?!? This GUI desktop stuff has gotten way outta hand. :)

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:03 am

hal is installed and the daemon is running but no icon appears when plugging in a usb device.
is there perhaps a flag I need to activate in a config file?

I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with gnome stuff because we don't even have gnome installed, only the libraries needed to run gimp, grip and some other programs.

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 8:59 am

Ice9 wrote:hal is installed and the daemon is running but no icon appears when plugging in a usb device.
is there perhaps a flag I need to activate in a config file?

I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with gnome stuff because we don't even have gnome installed, only the libraries needed to run gimp, grip and some other programs.

Actually I think it has everything to do with the gnome stuff (or desktop specific stuff in general). The gnome-volume-manager is the thing that does this within GNOME (reasonably certain of this):

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gno ... me-manager

gnome-volume-manager is a GNOME daemon that acts as a policy agent in top of the kernel, udev, d-bus and HAL. It listens to HAL events and reacts with user-configurable actions. Currently it supports automount of new media and hot-plugged devices, autorun, autoplay for CDs and DVDs, and automatic camera management. It is expected to be simple and free of polling and other evil hacks.

This would seem to support the theory of gnome-volume-manager, hal, and dbus being needed:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_gnome-volume-manager

If you have it installed you should have a GUI app to configure your preferences called "gnome-volume-properties" that looks a little like this:

In fact that image comes from a document that looks like it would be very helpful to you:

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/~mark/random/hal/

Now I assume all of this is desktop specific. This would be the GNOME way. If you do not use GNOME you would have to find out the way of whatever desktop environment you are using. Maybe I could help find that as well but I don't know what you are using. The reason it has to be DE speicifc is because each DE has a different way of displaying icons on the desktop.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:12 pm

I just checked on both other machines and there's no trace of gnome-voume-manager whatsoever.
We all use KDE and there probably is something similar (maybe even kde-volume-manger), found some references to a package kvm but it's nowhere to be found either ...

Edit:
Also, on my desktop is a "System" folder and when I insert a USB device an icon appears inside the "System/Storage Media" folder and from there I can "safely remove" the device.
If it's possible to have an icon appear in there it should be possible to make it appear on the desktop too, shouldn't it?

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:42 pm

I haven't used KDE in a while and I switch into KDE right at the moment but it looks like KDE should have it's own options for this:

http://www.win.tue.nl/bcf/linux/usage/usb-fedora.php

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 3:18 pm

THAT'S IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Show device icons was unticked!
Sweet Jezus, and I spent the last two days installing/removing stuff like ivman, pmount, usbmount, hotplug, discover, hal, dbus and many others I can't even remember anymore ....

thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you Void Main!
/me bows with tremendous respect!!!

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 3:32 pm

Bow to Google. :)

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 3:41 pm

What did you google for then?
I googled my @ss off and didn't come up with anything remotely useful besides a kvm that's still under heavy development ....

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 3:47 pm

Click Here and it was about the 8th link down.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 4:08 pm

ok

perhaps I was too specific, I googled for stuff like "kde usb icon", "kde volume manager", "kde volume manager icon" and it didn't give me anything useful ...

Anyway, thank you again!
I now have a nice icon popping up as soon as I mount the media and disappearing as soon as it's unmounted