Arch Linux

forgot to mention, I'm not the only one with this problem, here's a discussion in the forum http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=38046

Do you have gnome-volume-manager installed and are you member of the storage group?

yes and yes

I have similar problem with automount of USB stick in KDE. When plugging an usb device, I don't see anything in /var/log/messages.log.
I suspect this problem is kernel related, because I have this problem since I upgraded to kernel 2.6.23. Downgrading kernel to version 2.6.22 solved the problem for me.

A solution was posted to the forum that works for me, here it is:

Do the following in a root terminal:

nano /etc/hal/fdi/policy/90-user-methods.fdi

insert:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="volume.fsusage" string="filesystem">
<merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
<match key="@block.storage_device:storage.removable" bool="true">
<merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">false</merge>
<merge key="storage.policy.should_mount" type="bool">true</merge>
</match>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

reboot and external USB-Disk will be mounted automaticly after insert...


not sure if this is a gnome issue or a hal issue since other desktops seem unaffected according to other posters in the thread

I wasn't paying close attention when testing this fix; while it does restore automounting of USB devices, automounting of hard drive partitions no longer functions.

FWIW, automounting works on KDE (didn't work on GNOME, but haven't tested lately), so it might be a GNOME issue.

Weird, I don't have any issues with automounting.
Latest Core/Extra packages, hal & dbus running, member of storage group (not member of hal or dbus), no fam running.

Here, all devices are working fine so... can it be a faulty hardware or maybe some weird line in udev, hal or even usb-storage blacklist that is preventing this device to be detected as an usb-storage?

if you look at the HAL page in the wiki, there's actually mention of this problem there, as well as a solution that works for me (and yes I also checked the physical drive partitions this time)

I forgot to mention that I am also not able to mount my usb stick manually with kernel 2.6.23, while it's works with kernel 2.6.22. Configuration of /etc/hal/fdi/policy/preferences.fdi do not change anythings for me.

It's only a problem for ntfs formatted volumes for me. All usb sticks and external usb drives formatted fat32 work fine, while the one I have formatted with ntfs gives the error and will not mount. I also tried reformatting the drive with a problem to fat32 and it worked fine.

Okay, I did a little more searching and turns out I was going down the wrong road. Apparently ntfs cannot be mounted as user, so KDE will throw an error since the mount helper tries to mount as user. To fix it, right-click the device in storage media, then uncheck "mount as user" Now it should work.

This problem still exists in KDE and Milfadoodle's suggestion on the forums seems to fix it without any side effects. Thanks Milfadoodle! See:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=297389#p297389

So I have created a new patched version of the package source that can be downloaded from here:

http://viewvc.faunos.com/viewvc.cgi/extra/hal/trunk.tar.gz?view=tar

Jan, what do you think about the comment above?

Did you activate gnome-volume-manager in your session with Gnome 2.20 ?
A new Gnome version is out since then : 2.22.
Is this problem still valid ?

Also this new Gnome version uses GIO/GVFS and nautilus is responsible for mounting peripheral instead of gnome-volume-manager, so disabling gnome-volume-manger is something you should try with Gnome 2.22.

See my comments in #10328

I don't have the gnome-volume-manager installed, but automount works for everything I tested using gnome 2.22.1.
Is this fixed or is there anyone for whom it does not work with the latest gnome?