# HAL and USB Thumb Drives

## Dark Ninja

I recently installed HAL on my computer so my CDs and other media could be mounted automatically.  CDs work well.  I throw a CD in, and the CD is automatically mounted.  However, I can't seem to get the same thing to happen for USB thumb drives.  I can mount them manually, but I want them mounted on their own.

Any ideas/suggestions?  Thanks.

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## thesnowman

hald isn't the process that auto mounts for you, it's either gnome-volume-manager or ivman.  Which are you using?

I've found that recently gnome-volume-manager has tried to mount vfat partitions with the utf8 character set.  I did not have this compiled with my kernel, so they couldn't be mounted.  To check, look at /etc/fstab before and after inserting your USB drive and see which mount options it is creating the mount point with.  Then ensure your kernel has support for that character set.

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## Dark Ninja

Okay, well, I'm using ivman.

But, hal uses fstab-sync to create a line for any "found" devices.  Maybe I'll plug in my USB drive and see what line it puts in there.  I'll get back to you after I had a chance to test it.

Thanks for the idea.

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## mangolicious

I've had very bad results trying to automount usb drives using ivman. As far as I can see, ivman doesn't automount usb drives at all. I gave up on it. Now, I'm trying gnome volume manager by suggestion of thesnowman.

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## Dark Ninja

gnome-volume-manager seems to work well, actually.  Check out this tutorial: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_gnome-volume-manager

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## jwc

Hey folks, ivman is great, it mounts all sorts of stuff (of course usb drives) with no problems at all! I never had any problems with the standard install, and it doesn't have all these dependencies like gvm...

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## Dark Ninja

Did you just emerge it, or was there some setup you had to do as well?  Do you use DevFS or udev?  If udev, do you have your own rules setup?

Thanks

P.S.  What window manager/desktop environment do you use?

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## jwc

It's udev without user rules, kde 3.4 with the mediabackend enabled (doesn't interfere with ivman), hal userpolicies modified so I can (un)mount volumes with my user-rights. Everything else is just add-on (start krusader if I plug in my usbstick, kaffeine for dvds etc.). I'm running one system wide ivman for the mounting and one user-started ivman for the programs I want to start (as stated in the docs). Emerge ivman, add dbus/hal/ivman to rc-startup. Have luck,

Joost

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