Automounting support in KDE

From Elvanör's Technical Wiki
Revision as of 08:35, 19 September 2007 by Elvanor (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

With the kdebase-kioslaves package, KDE gets some automounting support. More importantly, you can mount / unmount media straight from Konqueror. It seems to me that this support is still young and relatively immature. I hope things will improve in the future. Meanwhile, here what you can do to get it to work.

The Basics

  • Follow this Gentoo HOW-TO.
  • Make sure your normal user is in the groups plugdev, haldaemon and messagebus. The latter two are not mandatory according to the HOW-TO but I think it's best to have them anyway.

How does it works

  • When navigating to the media:/ URL in Konqueror, Konqueror displays a list of all the devices found in /etc/fstab, if they are present in the system (plugged in). It is important to understand that the only configuration file involved is /etc/fstab (KDE calls a program called fstab-sync to know when the file has been modified).
  • Make sure your fstab line is correct (notably that it contains the user option). Also, when providing the device location, use the real location, not a symlink. Apparently a symlink can cause troubles.
  • Once this is done, when navigating to media:/ you should see a list of all your media. Double clicking on any of them should mount them.


What's unclear

  • What is unclear to me is how the automounting system of KDE works. Sometimes a popup will appear asking for a default action. I don't understand exactly how this works and how can it be configured.