Howdy All,

So I am using Ubuntu 10.04, with the Enlightenment WM, with nautilus for my file manager and I have installed the halevt package to handle the mounting of my external media.

My issue now is that when I mount the media as a normal user it is being mounted as read only - any ideas how I can have halevt mount the media so I can write to it as my normal user in addition to reading from it?

Cheers,
~Jeff

Apparently, others have encountered this problem.

This article from the Archwiki on configuring halevt recommends not starting it as a global daemon because that might cause conflicts.

I've never used it, but it could be that, if it starts as a global daemon, it would run under root authority; that might give ownership of devices it mounts to root.

You can put the devices in your fstab with the "user,rw" flags. You don't have to know the UUIDs to put them in the fstab. You could use a line like

Just for curiosity, did the devices mount okay without halevt? If so, what does halevt do for you to make it worth your while (in other words, why would I want to consider it)?

The devices do not mount without halevt. In fact if I do not have halevt install I am simply informed I am not authorized when I click on a driver under nautilus.

I'd rather not make edits to fstab. Is there someway other than halevt to handle the mounting of media as a normal user?

~Jeff

That's odd. When I plug in a USB mass storage device (camera, podplayer, drive), it has been detected and mounted automatically in any computer I've used since the 2.6.x kernel release without my having to do anything special, like add myself to additional groups and so on.

Even if I'm not using Gnome or KDE (and I usually use Fluxbox), the devices appear in Nautilus or Konqueror. I think something more must be going on.

Don't let editing the fstab frighten you (and it did intimidate me terribly the first time I did it--it reminded me of the time I tried to order a meal in Montreal using my high school French--the waiter finally took mercy on me and started talking English, but that's another story). In my limited experience, as long as you don't mess up the existing devices like sda1 or hda1 or cdrom, the worst that that is likely to happen is that the items you add won't work.

Just in case, make a backup (many text editors to that automatically) and proofread carefully.

Here's a thought.

Mount one of the devices using halevt, then go to Nautilus and find it in /media. Find out the mount point in /dev, go to the /dev/[mountpoint], right click on it, and note the properties and permissions.

I just did this with my external USB HDD. It showed root as the owner; root and the "disk" group had read/write permissions. Then check whether your user is in the "disk" group.