This is a challenge. This challenge has a few goals that must be met. It might be easy or it might be impossible; I don't know. The challenge is to get Linux to manage drives as simply and easily as Windows does. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of having to manually unmounting my cdrom before I press the eject button. Here are the goals:

1. Users (as in, accounts other than root) have permission to mount and unmount drives
2. All drives and partitions are automatically mounted at startup unless the drive is empty
3. Removeable drives automatically mount themselves when new media is inserted and unmount themselves when someone presses the eject button

That's about all I can think of at the moment. If those three goals get met I'll be very happy. I know some distributions already do one or more of these, but I want a way for any distro to do these. Maybe it's some fstab entries or maybe it requires a daemon. But let's do this!

gnome-volume-manager
dbus
udev
hal

expect these to be intergrated with gnome and kde in the next 4ish months.

and have fun watching your usbkey appear and disappear from your desktop as it is plugged in and removed.

As C-Junkie said, Robert Love's Project Utopia (dbus, hal, g-v-m) is set to solve exactly those problems. Supermount currently exists to do it now, but it's not a very highly-regarded solution.

The Gnome 2.8 roadmap includes full integration of Project Utopia, but whether they meet that is another matter entirely.

By the end of the year, Linux will be where Windows was a decade ago as far as drive management is concerned.

If you want to try it out, Gentoo has support via BreakMyGentoo. The ebuilds are dbus-cvs, hal-cvs, and gnome-volume-manager-cvs. I've gotten them to work just fine, but I don't use usb drives and rarely insert CDs or floppies under Linux.

Hey, BreakMyGentoo... the guys that run that go to my university!

Anyways, I apt-get'ed dbus-1, hal, and udev, rebooted, and X wouldn't start. It looks like something is incompatible with the nvidia drivers. I removed them (those packages, not the nvidia drivers) and X works fine again. I'm going to hope that everything gets working very soon.

interesting.

If I get the time in the enxt week, I'll get the nvidia drivers and install those packages and see what went wrong.

IIRC, the default udev install does not create the nvidia device nodes. Gentoo's ebuild will create them (and provides NVMakedevices.sh to do it manually), but I don't know how Debian does it. It does work, even with the newest drivers; at least for me it does. YMMV[smile].

There is a kernel-mode patch called SuperMount (included with Gentoo sources) that automatically handles the mounting & unmounting. You do still have to place an entry in fstab for it to work though.

e.g.
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 0 0

It is possible with some jiggery-pokery to make automount work for removable media - like supermount in some respects.

Whenever an app tries to access the directory that the removable device will be on, it is mounted automatically (the app gets blocked while it's mounting).

After a certain number of seconds of inactivity, the device is dismounted - assuming no open files (this includes directories used as the current working directory)

Supermount was good in principle, but had significant implementation problems and is only compatible with a few kernels. And it isn't really needed.

Mark