What about mount options (rw) and/or ownership of the files on the usb stick?

I mounted it rw. How do I set ownership of the files on the usb stick? It's all set as root. I even tried "chown -R user.user" on the whole partition. No dice. ARgh.

what's the filesystem on your pendrive?

If your pendrive auto-mounts, try right clicking on the icon for the pendrive and change the mounting options.

If you use KDE4, install the device notifier applet. It usually is by default.

If you mount it manually and it uses the fat32 or ntfs filesystem, use the `uid','gid','fmask' and 'dmask' mount options. These filesystems don't hold Linux permissions, so they are determined for the entire filesystem enmass when you mount it.

If the pendrive doesn't automount due to root permissions, then your policy kit permissions my not be configured correctly.
enter the command "polkit-auth". You should see this line:
org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable

Another possibility is that the filesystem is corrupt and the filesystem is then mounted read-only as a result.

if you are mounting by hand don't mount as root, mount as the user using the pmount program

pmount /dev/sdc1 blah

this will mount it under /media/blah
might need to do an fdisk -l first to see what the device really is instead of /dev/sdc1


then just pumount blah when your done

I solved it. I put "users,rw,uid=(number for my main non-root account)" for all ntfs-3g and vfat entries in fstab.

Since I defined my partitions by UUID already, this allowed me as a non-root user to do a straight "mount /dosx" (since /dosx is defined by fstab) instead having to sudo into fdisk to determine which /dev/sd?? /dosx went to and all that (thus shortening the work I have to do to mount a partition).