Re: Better (windows) partition interaction

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 17:36 +0100, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Today I had to poke around with /etc/fstab on my brother's computer to
> get his windows partitions mounted with the "user" attribute. This is
> just a no-no for the mass market. The reality is that according to
> google many users dual-boot and encounter this issue, even if some
> distro installers take care of adding fstab entries along the line, this
> won't work after repartitioning. In short: Doing partition detection
> statically sucks for home computers.
> 
> How feasible is it to add code to make extra partitions that are not in
> the fstab user-mountable, probably through hal, and expose them in
> "computer:///"?

This should work very nicely with HAL, provided

 1. the /system/storage/display_* gconf keys are set to TRUE. I
    basically think, at this point, we should rip out this code of
    gnome-vfs... I already suggested this earlier; Alex, can we
    rip out these keys and the code to support them? When these are
    all TRUE (or we have ripped out the code), all mountable volumes
    *will* be shown... provided:

 2. Your volumes don't have the volume.ignore property set to TRUE.
    Notably we do this in Fedora Core 5 for fixed drives.. since some
    people convinced other people that letting an unprivileged user
    mount ingfixed drive is a security violation.. Mind boggling...
    If you're on Fedora, just move the file 

     /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/99-redhat-storage-policy-fixed-drives.fdi

    out of the way, restart the hal daemon (remember to login and
    logout) and you should be good...

 3. So it comes down to your mount program now... gnome-mount will at
    this point probably happily mount the volume provided volume.ignore
    isn't set to TRUE or the volume isn't already listed in the 
    /etc/fstab file.. From what Martin says, pmount will probably refuse
    it but I'm not sure...

Btw, this volume.ignore bit will go away in at least Fedora once this

 http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2006-January/004377.html

is implemented in HAL / gnome-mount... then the default policy will
probably be to ask for auth if mounting fixed drives... we need that
infrastructure for lots of other things too (formatting of volumes
etc.)...

Btw, HAL actually blacklists certain firmware partitions like
HP_RECOVERY or Apple bootstrap so they are hidden as expected. We take
patches for other names... just want to mention this if you're expecting
these to show up :-)

So.. the answer is that most of this already works.. 

HTH,
David