MEPIS Community Forum

Are you talking about an entry in your fstab or something else?

When you plug a device into your computer, Mepis will first detect the device and then mount it automatically, under normal circumstances; that's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about automatic mounting at boot.

EDIT: Unplugging the device and plugging it back in does not help. Mepis detects and mounts the device just fine; the problem has to do with who's mounting the device. Whatever user has logged into the computer first will auto mount the device and prevent any other user from writing to the device, even if the session corresponding to the first user is not being used.

Not on any of my Mepis installs, I have to first click on the drive to mount it.

Have you tried using kwikdisk to unmount the drive before switching user?

Also, I'm starting to think you may have a fstab problem.

From the sounds of your reply, it doesn't appear that you have, or you forgot to say how far you'd gone in your quest. How much of my suggestion have you tried? So far, you only suggest you've tried changing the permissions on the folder in /media, without a single word regarding the device naming. Please re-read my suggestion and confirm/deny that you have done as I have prescribed.

In case you don't know what I am on about, unmount the device, fire up gparted, provide your root password, select the device from the drop down menu, right click on the devices partition and choose Label, then type a unique name that is less than 11 characters in length and without any spaces in the name, apply the changes, close gparted, unplug and replug the device, now it will be mounted with a device name, not a generic node which can be used by any device that "lands" in the corresponding position, and it is this name inside /media that I am referring to when the device is mounted.

I have about 11 flash drives, all of them have names that uniquely identify them, irrespective of what OS they are plugged into. The 2GB flash drives I use as bootable Live-Linux systems are labelled such that I have no doubt what drive is inserted and what it's purpose is. For example, 2GB_M11-32 is the name I give to my 32-bit bootable flash drive, 2GB_M11-64 is the name I give to my 64-bit bootable flash drive, both with the latest version, beta or other, of Mepis 11. My Parted Magic thumb drive is labelled PMAGIC510, the 510 refers to the version number and my two 8GB toolkit flash drives are labelled Mikes8Gi and Mikes8Ga, the last character tells me what brand of drive is installed.

The benefit of unique names is that when mounted into a unix-type system, the mount points for each will be totally unique and if I want, I can set different permissions for each mount point. If my drives had no partition name, I could plug in drive 1, it appears at /media/sdb1, I umount it, plug in drive 2, it appears at the same location, and so on for all 11. Does this help?

Mike P

The flash drive is formatted as FAT32, and when I formatted the flash drive, I gave it a label. When I plug the flash drive into my Mepis box, it appears to use this name under the /media folder... But, it does not retain permission information and, for whatever reason, I can't change the label in gparted.

What do you think? Perhaps formatting the drive under FAT32 was a bad decision on my part?


Yup. When I unmount the device I can manually mount it on any other session I like, but I don't want to have to resort to silly manual solutions like that.

If you want the drive mounted all the time then put it in your fstab using its UUID, use blkid to get the UUID, make a folder in media with the same name as the one you use in fstab and then put it in fstab: UUID=D4E4-A1A7 /media/flash-drive auto auto,users,exec,relatime 0 0

By the way kwikdisk is not silly it's a tool I have been using for many years to mount and umount partitions that may or may not be auto mounted, if I'm searching my home folder for foo I can save time by unmounting my 2TB drive when I know that foo is not on that drive, also I don't auto mount partitions that have other systems on them, but if I want to look at a file on that system I can use kwikdisk to temporarily mount the drive, but if you want to use the console to mount and umount partitions that's fine with me.

I don't see how clicking an option on a pop-up is such a huge hassle? Clearly, with your user claiming the flash drive by automounting it the drive is then owned exclusively by that user. There's no way getting around that. You can relax the default permissions your user sets on the drive so that your sister can write to it, but that seems to be going against the strong permissions model in Linux IMO.

If you really want to go down that road, you could try to set the uid, gid or umask options in fstab (see the mount command for specifics).

Or there's udev. Udev is the system that manages removable media and works with a system of rules. You should find some already in /etc/udev. You should be able to use it to recognise the flash drive, mount it somewhere consistent and define default permissions for it. However, the syntax for doing that is unusual and quite painful to work with - although it could just be me. Try this link for more info:
http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html

Permissions don't work on FAT 32 formatted drives. Plus FAT 32 will not preserve them either. I believe NTSF would be a better choice if you need Windows accessibility. Or you could try one of the programs that allow Windows to see and use Ext2/3 etc.

I've been very busy lately and haven't had the time to check back here, but now I'm back.

Thanks for all of your helpful advice; I think I'll look into my udev configuration files a bit, but if I can't find a solution there in a reasonable amount of time I'll just turn off auto mounting.

Thanks again for your help, I'll keep you updated on my progress.

EDIT: I messed around with udev for some time, but was unable to have it properly set permissions for removable flash drives. So, I did some more looking around online and found out that if I open "/home/<myuser>/.kde/share/config/medianotifierrc" and remove the lines regarding removeable drives, my system will not automount usb flash drives; however, mepis will still notify me with a popup whenever I plug a flash drive in. This solution satisfies me.

Once again, thank you all for your help.