LOTS and LOTS of automounting and other problems

English Hardware
1

OK, I have been using SuSE since 2001, version 7.x, back in the old days when I had rather limited hardware to deal with.

My most recent install on a completely new system, ver 11.0 on an Intel core duo, has now coused me hours of grief with hardware autodetection problems, and I know they’re not over yet.

I have NO solutions to everyone’s problems, but at least I will give you some leads to follow…and will follow up with the main packages, esp the yast2 folks.

On install I chose something like regular linux permission setup as opposed to linux acls, which I don’t know anything about.

As a normal, non-root user, some devices seemed to be recognized by KDE/udev (flash drves, CDs, etc.) but couldn’t be mounted. Device “discovery” seems to be under the jurisdiction of udev for the most part; to some extent what a user can do with this device seems to be under the jurisdiction of “hal”. Things are even more complicated now since there are a lot of possibilities for something like USB devices. Oddly, when any of my USB devices get mounted, they are mounted my the internal device name, and don’t do anything with the standard naming in /dev. This follows what is set up for them in the udev rules.

OK, more before I get too sidetracked. On my installation, NO normal could mount ANYTHING even after device detection. After doing some reading of the documentation (install hal-doc) I was lead to /usr/etc/PolicyKit for some insights. Look at the template file on this, and change for your users. This solved my USB devices and probably will solve my CD/DVD problem. However, my floppy device, which is somehow NOT currently handled as a hotplug device needs further attention. When I get this figured out, I will update this post.

Also, why the heck isn’t a neat little utility called ha-device-manager included with the SuSE distros??? :frowning:

OK, more later when I can back to this.

Seriously, this is very very bad in my estimation.

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Ok. So is this a kde4 install, Gnome or kde3?

Then we can help more.

3

Hello again :slight_smile:

kde3…

Also I’ve discovered my floppy insert is NOT setup as a udev event…nice that we have udevadm to see what’s going on.

However, it IS setup in hal as fd0, as I’ve added it to /etc/fstab in just kind of a generic mode. And…you can add a floppy device to the KDE3 desktop, but must do a manual mount to get things going.

I put my normal users in a “floppy” group, same as /dev/fd0, AND I symlinked /media/floppy to the user’s home directory in the so they don’t have to go searching all over the file system to find it. So…it’s a workaround for now.

Not ideal…but unless I can figure out how to turn my floppy insert into a “udev” event, I’m kinda dead in the water.

So…some progress, but still not happy about all these hassles.

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Hi kayschenk

I agree there have been substantial changes with policykit and udev/hal which has caused unexpected behaviour with various devices for many.

Have a look at /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules file. You should see 2 lines like this:

KERNEL==“fd[0-9]”, GROUP=“floppy”
KERNEL==“fd[0-9]”, ACTION==“add”, ATTRS{cmos}==“?*”, RUN+=“create_floppy_devices -c -t $attr{cmos} -m %M -M 0640 -G floppy $root/%k”

Adding the relevant user to the ‘floppy’ group might be the solution here.