MEPIS Community Forum

I have a USB flash drive plugged in all the time in my USB hub.

I use Mepis 8.0 and when I boot to KDE, I have to double click the USB flash drive icon to mount the flash drive.

How do I configure for auto-mount when booting?

Also, should a USB flash drive be listed in mnt or media?

In KDE4, try to use "System Settings" -> removable Device

Adrian, this is mepis 8 so it's KDE3.

For removeable media you'll need to dive into UDEV rules. It's perfectly doable, but trying to get your head around the syntax, at least for me, is a nightmare. This is a good page for info:
http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html

There are people with more expertise than me here, so do post back if you're still struggling.

Regarding mount points, I think the consensus is to mount internal drives at /mnt and removeable at /mount, but it's not set in concrete and you can do what suits you really.

Sorry, I should read the posts more carefully... that's what happens when you try to do stuff in between stuff...

IIRC, auto mounting flash drives and other devices was a common problem with SM 8.0. I had major trouble mounting SD cards -- I couldn't even get a desktop icon to appear when I plugged one in. I eventually had to write a script to mount the device, and altering the sudoers file allowed me to mount drives as a normal user so I wouldn't have to enter the root password to mount it. I launched the script from a permanent desktop icon I created, so it wasn't too much of an ordeal after I set it up.

At least you are getting a flash drive icon to appear on your desktop. Double clicking on the icon shouldn't be too much of an inconvenience, compared to the difficulty of delving into the mysteries of UDEV. One of these days Linus and his kernel crew will incorporate the UDEV function into the kernel where it belongs.

The good news is that KDE 4 seems to have fixed this behavior to a large extent, so maybe you should consider upgrading to a later version of SM.

Q - How do I configure for auto-mount when booting?
A - AFAIK you can't. Well you can by launching a script to run at log-in. But what would happen when you unplugged the device and plugged in another one after booting?

Q - Also, should a USB flash drive be listed in mnt or media?
A - I don't think it really matters which one you select if force mounting, but /media would be the customary mount point.

It don't matter if it is in /mnt or /media or your /home/mepisuser folder, just make sure you put a folder there with the same name as the name you use in /etc/fstab.

You need to first get the UUID of the flash drive, plug it in and then as root run 'blkid' in the console find the flash drive and note the UUID.

Now you need to add this to your fstab using the SuperUser file manager open /etc/fstab, make a new line above the entry: "# Dynamic entries below" this is where you will put the new line for your flash drive. I'm going to give you a couple of examples one for vfat and one for Linux.

UUID=ECAF-9B51 /home/mepisuser/usb vfat auto,users,gid=users,dmask=002,fmask=113,relatime 0 0

UUID=1bd86f42-8f2f-4d93-b30c-cdddec9621a9 /home/mepisuser/usb ext4 auto,users,exec,relatime 0 0

The first is for fat16 or fat32 and the second is Linux ext4 or change it to ext3 or ext2, whatever file system you are using on the flash drive.

Change the names and the UUID as needed.

Very informative feedback folks, many thanks.