I still contend with you on this. USB devices mount on plugin and are available in all applications.
DVD’s work fine too, though you don’t get the popup dialog like kde3 asking what you would like to do: eg; play movie dvd with mplayer or vlc or whatever. There is no mount un-mount issue, the dvd mounts, and right click it in places in dolphin to eject or just press the dvd tray button.
if this works for you . . . and not others . . . then it is a bug.
I’ll take a look through bugzilla and file a bug if I can’t find anything.
Admittedly I was using 4.1.0 on the KDE live CD but I can’t find any documentation about this being fixed in subsequent upgrades.
If you google the issue you will see there are many many people with the same issue.
I done a little more testing on this. On my ThinkPad it pops up the message from Device Notifier and the USB device is in ‘Places’ when I open Dolphin.
On my Box the Device Notifier appears - but it is NOT showing in ‘Places’ (but it did in the past) and I’m not sure when it stopped. But the device is mounted in /media. And if I navigate there and click on the USB device folder it open the folder and pops the device into ‘Places’ as well. So I don’t know why there is a difference as both are running virtually like for like, only the box is _64. And a newer kernel. (My laptop is on 2.6.25.16-0.1 because of a suspend issue)
However, both PC’s access the USB device with other programs (eg;k3b) without any mounting required, because as I say they are mounted!
Hope that is clear.
this is what I am doing and see the issue.
My external (samsung) drive is plugged in premanently.
Boot Opensuse 11
Load K3B
Cannot locate exteranl hard drive from within K3B
Go into Dolphin
Click on the Samsung device listed in the left of Dolphin.
Restart K3B
Device can be found.
Can be reproduced in other applications exactly as in K3B.
Mmmhh…my drives are definitely NOT mounted, before using Dolphin (checked it in the terminal/console with mount).
By the way, I opened a Bug/Wish at KDE-Bugtracker for this:
Bug 175611 – Wish - Automount of drives in KDE 4 without Dolphin
So Folks please vote for the Bug/Wish if you have the same problem! 
I’ve also opened a bug at Opensuse KDE 4
Please vote.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=447932
OK - so entereing a bug has given at least a definitive reply confirming that there is no automount in KDE4.
Here is what was said
*It’s a deliberate policy change from KDE 3 (automount) to KDE 4 (mount on
demand), because with automount and multiple logins, all sessions race to mount
the volume. leading to the “Huh, why can’t I write my USB disk - oh, i started
a new session and my wife’s KDE session mounted it first” scenario. Instead
you have ‘mount on demand’ so you should be able to cause the device to mount
from any app where you need to access it.
Unfortunately, KDE 3 apps like k3b don’t know anything about the new ‘mount on
demand’ policy. You should use the New Device Notifier that pops up on plug to
mount the usb disk, then it will be visible in k3b’s filedialog. It’s a little
clumsy but we don’t have a better solution from upstream - it would require
rewriting kde3’s file dialog to detect when it is running in a KDE 4 session
and request a mount via HAL as Solid does in KDE 4.
*
eventually allthose kde3 apps will be updated to QT4.
What I wonder about though is how this will work with GTK apps down the track.
Thanks for the update. I would have thought it would be sensible to have some kind of option to automount the devices for all (or selected) users if preferred. That way the first session up would do the mounting, but not to the exclusion of others.
Sorry I have been away for a while.
Fantastic responses thank you all.
Now we have the solution to permissions with NTFS external drives. An explanation on the removal of Automounting in KDE4.
Has anybody had any luck with getting eSATA drives to be auto detected by dolphin/kde4 when they are plugged in like USB works currently?
Thanks,
OnTarget
I’m having the same problem. My fat32-USB-HD is not mounted, a message in dolphin tells: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply did not receive a reply. When I shutdown my computer there are two fails: unmounting fuse…hmhmhm and unmounting file systems saying that / is busy.
How can I obtain the original messages from the shutdown protokoll?
The hd is not mounted under kde3 and kde4, I tried with Knoppix 5.3 and everything works fine.
fdisk -l
Platte /dev/sdi: 320.0 GByte, 320072933376 Byte
255 Köpfe, 63 Sektoren/Spuren, 38913 Zylinder
Einheiten = Zylinder von 16065 × 512 = 8225280 Bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2420a410
Gerät boot. Anfang Ende Blöcke Id System
/dev/sdi1 1 38913 312568641 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/etc/fstab
/dev/sda2 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/sdb1 /Musik reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/sda4 /Musik2 reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/sda3 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/sda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /data reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2
Help appreciated…no newbie but not an admin,
My first advice would be to start a new thread. tell us what version of openSUSE you are using, because I see you have reiserfs as your Linux file system? Which is not the default choice in OS11.0 or 11.1
Not that that should cause the issue you have with your usb hd. Which if it is a FAT file system, it should be just plug and play.
You can find boot log messages here: /var/log
in response to the original post, the usb drive mount in r/w seems to have been solved by the symlink, but still requires an additional action by clicking on the devicenotifer and opening dolphin which mounts it. At one time, there was a plasmoid offered at kde-look called “new device notifier with automount” that claimed to by-pass the need to call dolphin, which I have not tested but noticed and downloaded the source. The way plasma has changed, I’m not sure that it would still work, even if it originally did, but you can check.
on the esata device, if it is ntfs you could install ntfs-configure and let it setup the device in fstab, an ext3 esata device can be manually entered.
The issue seems to be fixed by granting authority using (as root) the tool polkit-auth.
Details:
As the user that is unable to mount the DVD, CD-ROM, or some such removable device. Open a bash shell and run:
# polkit-auth
You should see nothing, or at least you should NOT see this
org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable
IF you do indeed see nothing return by running polkit-auth then the following should fix your problem.
Run the following as root (replace <user_name> with your user account name):
# sudo polkit-auth --grant org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable --user **<user_name>**
# sudo polkit-auth --grant org.freedesktop.hal.storage.eject --user **<user_name>**
Now as the ordinary user account (the one having trouble mounting), again run the command:
# polkit-auth
Now you SHOULD see:
org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable
org.freedesktop.hal.storage.eject
Now both mounting and ejecting should work in Dolphin, and possible other apps too.
HTH
Mark