[Techtalk] disk labels and external drives

[Wim De Smet]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 10:28 AM,  <john.sturdy at ul.ie> wrote:
> Miriam English writes:
>  > Hi LittleGirl,
>  >
>  > Thanks for the suggestion, even though it didn't work. :(
>  > I kinda expected it wouldn't because /media is just another place to
>  > mount stuff. Ubuntu, and I think Debian, have begun using this for USB
>  > devices, but mine (Puppy) doesn't, by default. Nevertheless I gave it a
>  > shot, just in case there was something weird I didn't know about.
>
> I think it may be Gnome that does this, rather than Debian itself; I
> use Debian, and I usually use Ratpoison (a non-desktop window manager)
> and it doesn't mount USB drives automatically; occasionally I select
> Gnome at login time (e.g. if I'm using GIMP, which is a poor fit with
> Ratpoison) and when I'm using that, it does mount USB drives
> automatically when I plug them in.

It's nautilus doing the mounts (in response to a message from hal).
There are alternative options, but usually you want some support in
whatever file manager you're using to do it for you. Pmount is a quick
way to do it from the command line in any window manager, assuming
it's still supported. There's also halevt which looks interesting.

You wouldn't believe how hard it was to find that about nautilus btw.
Nobody documents anything. Except in bug reports, I suppose.

cheers,
Wim