This is a "why" question rather than a "how to" question. I notice that at least two recent distributions mount usb drives to a subdirectory that they create within a subdirectory of /media rather than simply mounting to a subdirectory of /media. For instance, in KDE Mint 13 my Lexar jump drive is automatically mounted to a directory /media/Lexar_Media, but in KDE Mint 17 it gets mounted to /media/username/Lexar_Media. Even stranger, the current Mageia automatically mounts the Lexar jump drive to /run/media/username/Lexar. I know Mandriva mounted to /media/Lexar.

Why this change? For that matter, why did distributions stop using /mnt for mounting drives?

Richard Dawson

I use Fedora-gnome and it automounts to /run/media/<user>/<drive name>. /run is a tmpfs. My other Fedora-xfce does not automount but uses the gnome disks utility to mount in the same place. So each distro and desktop has a different flavor, it seems.

I am not a desktop expert, but I recall reading that /mnt is preferred for fstab based mount points at boot time or system events. /media/ is for user directed mounts.

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The /media is a common place and has been for quite a number of years in many distro's. Forget why they did it exactly, something to do with something related to common use not any technical issue. So maybe pwalden is correct.
You may find differences still in major distro's. I think Debian is an odd place. /var or /tmp maybe. Not sure it really affects user except to know the distro.

We were discussing this on my LUG's forums last night.

The /media/run stuff seems to be a udisks2 thing:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archiv.../t-277383.html

http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/...oss-for-linux/

The point of this changes is to make Linux more suitable for multiseat usage. Mounting removable storage devices to a directory owned by your user increases security when more than one user is connected to the machine.

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That is a reasonable rationale. Thanks.

Debian mounts to /media/username/. The default location can be changed if you really want to.

Hi,
I think this (eg /mnt/mydrive) was a misuse of /mnt. As I understand it /mnt was supposed to be a single mount point, not a directory to create mount points. See for example http://www.linuxbase.org/betaspecs/fhs/fhs/ch03s12.html

So /mnt is "supposed" to be used like:
not like

Evo2.

Hi,
What part of "Debian" does that?

Evo2.