How to have extra HDD's automount

[Qqmike]

Re: How to have extra HDD's automount

mando_hacker: "It does take a little setting up though and no GUI will do it for you."

... well, while you are at it here, m-h, why not write a GUI for us to do this automatically?

Oops, hang on, I gotta break away for a few minutes ... looks my fav Aunt Minnie is having one of her spells ...



(nice work there m-h; I can honestly say that I would not have guess it in my wildest of guesses)

[dibl]

Re: How to have extra HDD's automount

I guess I still haven't got my head around the problem here. Every storage device (and I have 3 varieties of these) that I have plugged into my USB connector has appeared in the little "new device notifier" widget within about 10 seconds, unless I have my VMWare Player running, in which case it appears in the Win XP session there. If I click it in the "new device" notification, it pops open in a Dolphin window. If I just open Dolphin at some point after plugging in the device, that device appears on the left edge of the Dolphin window, somewhere among my other 9 partitions that are automatically mounted.

I have taken to labeling my partitions since I rearranged my hard drives before installing 9.04 -- it seems to make life easier to look at labels that bear some resemblance to the data or OS that are on the partition -- easier on my old brain than trying to remember what /dev/sdb2 is.

[Oceanwatcher]

Re: How to have extra HDD's automount

Just had a bit of a blow-out in another thread about harddisks :-)

Here is the situation in my Kubuntu 9.04 setup:

I have a dual boot with WindowsXP

I have made it a habit to always label a harddrive or partition when I create or format it.

In Dolphin, all partitions and harddisks show up with the correct label. No need to do anything special.

USB disks and USB memory sticks ( essentially all USB storage devices ) automounts without me having to do anything or getting asked any questions. This is how I expect it to be. It is my computer and my harddisk.

What I do not understand is why I need a sudo password to mount the partitions that are already inside my laptop?

I would argue that people that are able to put a new harddisk inside a computer should not have to worry about automounting. But people that are able to put multiple OS'es on the computer and do not want them to mount are more than capable of editing a textfile to keep them from automounting :-) Or simply rightclick on the drive and click Never Mount and Hide.

I understand the heritage of Linux. And that usability never was a concern. But the world changes and we learn new things. And sometimes new things actually makes sense :-)

[Qqmike]

Re: How to have extra HDD's automount

I partition and repartition a lot. I change things a lot -- disks, partitions, OSs.
To keep things straight, I do various things -- keep a list of partitions handy (that would be on yellow tablet paper in ball point pen), label the title lines in menu.lst (title Kubuntu X.X.X "test" on sda8 by configfile), etc.

I need to know my sdxn's.

This all comes down to personal needs and preferences. Within reason, the OS should provide some degree of universal capability/configuring, at least along the simple and commonsense lines of the user needs expressed in this thread.

We have shimmery, shaky, vibrating, melting transparent and translucent multicolor boxes all over the place, with Beyonce dancing on one cube side while a simulation runs an another, things fading in and things fading out, all that crap ... Why can't there be a fair and reasonable amount of effort put into disk & partition access?

I don't get it. Even as I admit to being somewhat eccentric.

[Oceanwatcher]

Re: How to have extra HDD's automount

We have shimmery, shaky, vibrating, melting transparent and translucent multicolor boxes all over the place, with Beyonce dancing on one cube side while a simulation runs an another

Lol - well put. But you know, simple things that are just there to do a "grey" job are not cool and sexy. So I think they easily get left out.

[dibl]

Re: How to have extra HDD's automount

But you know, simple things that are just there to do a "grey" job are not cool and sexy. So I think they easily get left out.

Oh, I don't know about that .... have you ever tried to count how many text editors are available for Linux?

[flarson]

Re: How to have extra HDD's automount

What I do not understand is why I need a sudo password to mount the partitions that are already inside my laptop?

I would argue that people that are able to put a new harddisk inside a computer should not have to worry about automounting. But people that are able to put multiple OS'es on the computer and do not want them to mount are more than capable of editing a textfile to keep them from automounting :-) Or simply rightclick on the drive and click Never Mount and Hide.

I understand the heritage of Linux. And that usability never was a concern. But the world changes and we learn new things. And sometimes new things actually makes sense :-)

You are mistaking usability for meeting your needs. Multiuser is not multi OS. A system that behaves as you want it to would be unusable for many of us. You are welcome to develop a system, or convince someone else to develop a system, that operates as you want, but that does not mean that someone who has developed a system that is not what you want has developed a system that does not make sense.

[Oceanwatcher]

Re: How to have extra HDD's automount

You are of course absolutely right. My needs need not be good for everyone else. But that also go for your needs. And I still can not understand why one type of storage is treated different from another. THAT is not part of the usability... At least it should be consistent. And I have a big problem explaining this to other users.

[dibl]

Re: How to have extra HDD's automount

And I still can not understand why one type of storage is treated different from another.

Really? I guess if all the storage devices in the world, and the Linux OS, had all been first invented last year, then there would be a better argument for your view on this. But the OS that we're working with today is the developmental descendant of the Unix of the 1960s -- and look at how many different storage device types have come and gone in the interim (remember tape drives?). Do you see an external USB connector as "the same" as the IDE or SATA controller interface on the motherboard, if you account for the potential use of Linux for running servers of one kind and another? Why would the developers assume that any storage device connected anywhere on the platform should be instantly accessible to any user who manages to log into the system? I wouldn't want such a loosey-goosey approach to the accessibility of my storage devices -- it's fine for Windows notebooks and bachelors' personal computers, I suppose, but I don't think that global automatic accessibility, regardless of the type of storage device, makes any sense at all for an OS that has servers as one of its main target applications. That's just my two cents' worth on it, since we're swapping opinions.