[clue] problems with Debian

[marcus hall]

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Louis Miller <veganguy at canadaseek.com> wrote:

>       I'm trying to switch from Ubuntu to Debian. I plugged in my USB hard
> drive into Ubuntu and it always recognizes it and puts the little icon on
> the screen. With Debian, they don't make it quite so easy. My hard drive
> didn't get mounted. I went

Depending on which version of Debian you are using, there may be two paths to
look into..  The 'hal' process is deprecated and distributions are going
through the process of removing it.  You probably want to try to find out if
the version of debian you are using has done this or not (Ubuntu 11.04 has
removed hal).

If hal has not been removed, then it plays a big part in automounting usb
devices.  If it has been removed, then aparently the udev process cooperates
with the volume manager to get things mounted.

The whole strategy seems to be relatively undocumented, and I have a
mythbuntu box that has been updated to 11.04 and is now no longer automounting
usb devices.  I can see (via "udevadm monitor") that udev detects the
device being plugged in, but I'm still searching for the next step in the
chain.  I think that I need to be looking into the thunar volume manager
next, but I haven't dug much into that yet.  (Not a huge priority at the
moment, so I may not get around to it for some time yet...)

marcus hall
marcus at tuells.org