How do I disable automount? I can't watch a movie from cd without annoying interrupts (probably it unmounts cd while I'm still watching) and when using a floppy there is a continuous activity on floppy (I think it umounts and mounts the floppy on a short interval).

I found this thread but I think I have automount, not supermount because I don't find anything with "apropos supermount". I have 2 /usr/sbin/automount processes running owned by root. If I kill them automount stops. Now how am I supposed to disable automount (besides chmod a-x /usr/sbin/automount) from atarting whenever I boot?

u can edit ur /etc/fstab.
in the cdrom block u must have automount, change this to noauto.

I am sure ur cd is not unmounted unless u request it 2 be. same for the floppy

I'd say that my /etc/fstab is ok:
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0
/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0

That damn automount must be set up somewhere else.

I don't know if cd is really unmounted, that is just my guess, because after I kill the processes with name "automount" movie playback from cd works ok.

Oh, and this is on Mepis (Debian based, although this automounting stuff looks more Knoppix-like to me), not SuSE.

try these two:
1) grep automount </etc/inittab
2) locate automount | grep /etc/rc

however i'm sure it doesn't unmount busy drives (it can't!), maybe it keeps polling the drive. U may send a bug report to the mantainer of this package: "since /proc is much faster than removable media, shall automount check with lsof before phisically accessing a device?"

No output with:
grep automount </etc/inittab
locate automount | grep /etc

True. That's why copying files from cd works ok, but during playback cd is not being read all the time, only from time to time. If the file is not kept open all the time, cd can be umounted.

I don't know if this is really a bug, probably I'm supposed to just increase the period of inactivity before unmounting, I believe that's set in /etc/auto.master, I have 4 seconds for cd and 2 secs for floppy. I'm used to manually unmount removables (it's just a right click on the desktop icon and select unmount or eject, no big deal) so I have no need for automount, just want to disable it.

Would it be safe to chmod a-x /etc/init.d/autofs?

well, the wrost thing that may happen is getting an error message at boot time, i suppose. In any case, nothing that a chmod back can't fix

However, I still think a movie player does not close/reopen files wile playing, it makes no sense: do you close a book (loosing bookmark) whenever you make a 5secs break in reading? Even a mp3 file, which has much lower bitrate and could be kept all in ram, is kept open while playing.