KDE4 ntfs-3g mounting/unmounting without being root

Hi,
I’ve just set up an opensuse 11 install on our workshop computer at work (we fix pc’s). I’ve setup windows xp in a virtualmachine if we need it. The reasoning was I can copy files from customers infected HDD over to ours without worrying about it spreading to our OS (that happened to our XP install, hence the reason I decided to use Opensuse).
Anyway the basic problem is this: We use USB docks and place the HDD’s from customers PC’s into these to backup their data before we reinstall their virus ridden/trashed Windows installations, then we put the data back across afterwards. We do this several times a day.
Currently when I plug in a hard drive with NTFS (which is most peoples) device notifier pops up but dolphin can’t mount it because it needs root access to mount ntfs.
I then have to launch ntfs-3g and tick the ‘writeable’ box on the newly discovered drive. Dolphin can then read and write to it. But after I’m done I can’t unmount it to remove it because dolphin doesn’t have root access! So I have to either run kdesu dolphin or go to the commandline.
Now I can do this fine myself…but the other guys here aren’t linux nerds like myself and they want to be able to plug it in, click the drive and drag files back and forth like they can under XP.
So is there a way with policy kit we can give dolphin/device notifier root access and also make them mount with write access to ntfs?

For clarity this is what I would do with the commandline:

(become root)
mkdir /media/“ntfsvolume”
ntfs-3g /dev/sXXX/ /media/“ntfsvolume” -o force
(goto dolphin and copy files etc etc)
umount /dev/sXXX

Sooooo, if anyone knows how to make this a painless all gui operation it would be great!

Maybe they could use ntfs-config
It should be in yast

Geoff

It (hot plug automount of ntfs external drives) finally works in KDE-3.5.10 on 11.1. You could switch to KDE-3.5.10

Just tested and it works in kde4.13 on 11.1
Drive is auto mounted and has read write access in /media in dolphin

Geoff

Geoffro, oldcpu - Thanks for your feedback - great news about automounting ntfs! The problem is I have only got 11.0 because 11.1 wouldn’t install due to intel driver issues in the new kernel. I have however got the kde4 factory repo running and am up to date with that.
Do you know which packages are in 11.1 that make this all happen. If you knew what packages and which version maybe i could get the backports repos that contain them and update my system and it might work??
just spent a long time at work getting 11.0 setup with virtualbox running XP and not too keen on doing a fresh install of 11.1 from the DVD even though it would probably solve the intel driver issue - partly because I might get my butt kicked for “wasting time” =)

Thanks again,
Andrew

No.

Thats well beyond my level of expertise.

Sorry same here

/Geoff

I have openSUSE 11.1 with the bundled version of KDE 4.1 and the hot plugging of external USB NTFS drives works fine, just like you said. However, I can’t seem to make “shortname=mixed” as the default NTFS mount settings, do you know how to do this?

Cheers