Re: magicdev and non-CD devices

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 14:01, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 16:38, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > But a few quick notes: 
> >  - Actually, displaying icons on the desktop has nothing
> >    to do with magicdev. That's handled within nautilus.
> >    On Red Hat Linux, it should actually be possible to
> >    get USB/Compact flash working with only nautilus changes;
> >    we had it working with MC for a release or two before
> >    switched over to magicdev.
> 
> What I understood is that Nautilus finds devices that the user should be
> able to mount (string 'user' or owner, I think, on /etc/fstab, such as
> Floppy, Cdrom, etc...[1]).
> 
> That way, nautilus will never find how to mount usb/compact flash by it
> self, requiring a slight change to /etc/fstab (I may be wrong, if so
> don't flame, please correct me).

The way that it used to work (as I recall) was that 'kudzu' was run
out of the hotplug script and updated /etc/fstab to show the 
new device.

(For devices with removable media, such as USB floppies, kudzu only
added them into /etc/fstab when there was media in the drive.)

Once you have that, you could go multiple ways:

 - kudzu could automount such devices itself, though then you
   have the potential problem that the device wasn't mounted by
   the user, so they may not be able to unmount.

 - magicdev could automount such devices (it already notices
    /etc/fstab changes)

With either of those too possibilities, all nautilus needs to do is
display the newly mounted device, as it does for CD-ROM drives.

You could also make nautilus show a desktop icon with a right-click
option to mount, but generally the idea is to keep the idea of
mounting from the user, so you probably don't want to do that.

The first step probably would to be look what hotplug/kudzu does
now.

Regards,
`					Owen