PROBLEM #1
Mounting floppies / USB disks from root has worked fine from root.
But does anyone know how to mount these when not in root?

When I try, Fedora Core 4 tells me that I don't have the permissions: it's a bit of a pain if you have to log in as root to mount anything.
Using the 'mount' command won't work unless you're 'su' in terminal mode as a normal user, too.


PROBLEM #2
Even when I have the things mounted, Fedora tells me that I don't have the permission to write to the floppy / USB etc. when not as root. So I logged into root to change this & alter the permissions,

...but this is the STRANGE bit:

when I right clicked on the floppies etc. to alter the permissions, and put a tick in the box for users in the same group to be able to write, and also in the box for Others to write, the tick disappeared just after I put it in!

I tried it again, but every time I try to tick the box to change the permissions, it disappears again!


How can I fix this? Or is my PC playing mind games with me?

1 - ensure they have direct entries in /etc/fstab and have the "user" option specified for each one.

2 - they don't support the file permission attributes you wish to change. there is simply nowhere for that change to be stored. you can force permissions on non unix filesystems using the umask= option in the relevant fstab entry.

So about the directories in /etc/fstab...

do I just type

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/USB or
mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

or is there a bit more to it than that? (I'm guessing there is)



If so, are there any good Howto's out there on how to use the /etc/fstab file, would you know?



Thanks

In your case you would open /etc/fstab with KWrite (or whatever you use) as root and add the following:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/USB user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy user,noauto 0 0

(pressing TAB a few times for the gaps)
This will make it so that any user can mount the device, although on my system I don't know whether i've done something wrong but I can't copy files and folders to them (but my spare hard drive is old and keeps malfunctioning anyway, so it might just be that!)

What I did then was make a link to the drive on the Desktop (this is in KDE, so it might not work in GNOME) and when I clicked on it, it mounted it and opened a Konqueror window displaying it's contents.

Hope that helps!

P.S. Using the noauto option in fstab means that it won't mount at system startup, but only when it's required. This is useful if you plug in your USB stick after boot-up. Also, you can plug in any 1 USB flash memory device at boot, and it will still work! (it does on mine anyway!)

Thanks very much


I just came across a good howto in simple english, as well (if anyone else is reading this)

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html