I have a suspicion that this is related to the "million-zillion filesystem icons" problem that plagues the current version of HAL. It's just a little more obvious in GNOME that something isn't right. HAL, when queried about possibly-mountable filesystems, returns a list of filesystems that pretty much includes everything, including filesystems which are both mounted and not hot-pluggable. If you have a lot of different disks and filesystems on your machine, this can get ugly fast. On my primary devel desktop, I've got partitions allocated for four full and reasonably robust installs of Linux, meaning three partitions for each, plus a small handful of common filesystems (like /tmp and /home). GNOME puts an icon on the desktop for each hot-pluggable/mountable filesytem based on HAL's report, so I wind up with over twenty filesystem icons appearing on the desktop, all for partitions which are very much mounted by the system at boot time, many of which were I to unmount would likely result in very unpleasant things happening.

You're probably actually not supposed to access / through media:/, since I thought that URI was meant strictly for removable/hot-pluggable media, but this bug I'm referring to could make such things happen.

I'd kinda like to sort this out completely, but so far it looks like just the result of "some missing pieces" in HAL (remember, it's a 0.x version still) and the thought of reverse-engineering this further makes my head hurt. I have hopes that as the HAL devs actually complete HAL, this problem will go away along with all the other stuff that HAL doesn't know about yet. (Browse the output of the hal device managers and admire the voluminous number of things that HAL claims ignorance on.)

Those who want to experiment will find that the following policy directives (cribbed by Dropline from RedHat) will make HAL behave rationally and stop reporting that all filesystems are hot pluggable when asked, by telling it to flat out ignore any filesystems which are not on hot-pluggable or removable devices.

Stick in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/99-fixed-storage-fix.fdi or wherever you prefer

Is there anything else or do I need to explain why HAL is not actually auto-mounting anything? (Because it appears that thinking it does this has been confusing some people)

I don't think I ever said HAL automounted anything (and if I did I was being silly). I suspected that the ability to access the root partition through media:/ was a bug (since the partition is clearly mounted and cannot safely be unmounted while the system is running), but nonetheless it is possible to access it (I didn't bring up the subject, I just confirmed a solution to continue exploiting a possible bug because some people don't feel like changing...). Nonetheless, your post was informative, evilDagmar. Thanks for bringing actual logic and reasoning into this long-winded debate.

I added groups to my user
and everything is working.
no hall deamon messages anymore.
cd loading, dvd loading, usb dev loading.

problem solved tnks

Is HAL able to mount LUKS encrypted USB removable drives?

I'm getting "Cannot open /media/.hal-mtab" while trying to "safely remove" flash drive. Any solution?

That's an odd one. I've been unable to reproduce it here, even when intentionally trying to break things - if I make the permissions 0000 on that file, they get reset to the appropriate values when doing an operation that requires that file.

I've found a few bug reports on other distros, and most of them were somehow tied to "gnome-mount," even though nobody offered an explanation of what was going on. I don't use or even have gnome installed, so I can't speculate on that - however, do you have gnome installed?

No, I don't have GNOME installed. Now I solved this problem but I don't understand the reasons of such behaviour..
p.s. flash must be mounted to /media/sda1

What did you do to solve it then?

That wasn't the solution, because it's not true.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...l-mtab-625278/
that wasn't actually the solution but it works.

Hi:

I am new to Slackware 12. My only experience with Linux has been with Mandriva which I loved..... I opted to change to Slackware 12 in hopes of gaining more control of the system.

My issue from the get go once install is complete I am unable to open my DVD drive. It and my primary install partition show as unmounted. My other 2 partitions show as mounted. If I try to mount either of these unmounted devices I get an error from Konqueror saying a security policy is not allowing this message from being sent?????

I thought it might be a glitch in my install so reloaded the OS.

Same issue persists. Have been told this is related to hal but have confirmed it is running.

Any ideas would be appreciated....

Gord

Pls read the first post in this thread.

Uncle57, as H_TeXMeX_H said, read the first post in this thread (and if you still can't figure it out, read the whole [long] thread, even though it diverges a bit). In short: you must add your user to the plugdev, cdrom, audio and video groups and then restart messagebus (or just restart your PC).

I understood that much from the first message.....

But the how to do it I do not understand. Perhaps I have come to the wrong group.

Thanks For Your Time

Gord

to add a user to a group run:

do this for your user and with each of the groups mentioned above, as root, then restart

Uncle57, the users in this forum generally are very helpful. It's just that this particular issue has been brought up so many (SO many) times, and many people (myself included) have had to answer the same question so many (SO many) times. This thread contains everything you need to know about getting automounting to work -- it's just that the information is scattered over a very long and polluted thread. There are also several other threads on the matter with full details. I can understand why you would post asking for help when this thread is so very long and the first post, although very well written, isn't exactly newbie-friendly (ie you do have to know how to add your users to groups in order to get it to work). H_TeXMeX_H's advice is solid. I usually take the easy way out and edit /etc/group, adding my username(s) to the end of each line for each of the above-mentioned groups (plugdev, cdrom, audio and video). Both methods should work.

Sorry to sound rude on this particular topic -- it's just that it's been said so very many times that it's tempting to say GIYF or RTFM.