-the user is a member of all the required groups.
-usb stick automounts correctly on my machine which the same version, kernel level etc.
#lsblk shows
root@hera:/home/prof# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 55.9G 0 disk
|-sda1 8:1 0 500M 0 part /
|-sda2 8:2 0 500M 0 part [SWAP]
|-sda3 8:3 0 8.3G 0 part /usr
|-sda4 8:4 0 1K 0 part
|-sda5 8:5 0 1.5G 0 part /opt
|-sda6 8:6 0 43G 0 part /home
|-sda7 8:7 0 750M 0 part /var
`-sda8 8:8 0 1.5G 0 part /tmp
sdb 8:16 1 7.2G 0 disk
`-sdb1 8:17 1 7.2G 0 part
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom

#lsusb shows
root@hera:/home/prof# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 090c:1000 Silicon Motion, Inc. - Taiwan (formerly Feiya Technology Corp.) Flash Drive
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

trying to mount gives
root@hera:/home/prof# mount /dev/sdb
mount: can't find /dev/sdb in /etc/fstab
root@hera:/home/prof# mount /dev/sdb1
mount: can't find /dev/sdb1 in /etc/fstab
root@hera:/home/prof#

I probably can't see this for looking at it. Clues happily read!

In thunar under edit/preferences go to the Advanced tab and make sure that you have "Enable Volume Management" selected. Then in Configure on the same tab slect it to automount removeable drives.

For the mount command to work since you probably don't have an /etc/fstab entry you need to supply a mount point, eg.
Brian

thanks Brian but still no joy, I've made those adjustments to the kids machines, enabling both mounting on insertion and hot-plugging, then rebooting and they still don't automount... I've tested the USB ports on the machines with a usb mouse to see if there was something physically wrong with them, but no.

curiously, their usb sticks mount properly on my machine and I have neither of those boxes clicked on that Thunar configuration page. This is a puzzle.

Are you able to mount them manually? Which groups are you in? Also try the other usb ports.

Is your user account the member of the USB group?

the_penguinator,

I'm running an up to date version of slackware-current on my Acer netbook and it auto mounts USB sticks just fine.
I suspect a permission issue or perhaps you need to enable auto mounting of devices.

there is no group "USB" on my machine (slack64 -current), and the stick automounts on mine
there is no group "USB" on the users machines (slack32 -current), and the stick does not automount on theirs

the usb ports are physically functional as a mouse is detected and works
the changes Brian recommended made no change in behaviour on the users machines

It's actually the plugdev group.

Check /etc/group and ensure you're a member of plugdev.

plugdev:x:83:hitest

Yes, plugdev (my bad on that one) is needed because automounting is done via the udisks or udisks2 daemons for usb storage devices.

You should be able to access the user/groups permissions in "kuser", or you can do it via command line (though I can't remember the commands off the top of my head at the moment).

Edit /etc/group and add your regular user to plugdev

sorry for the late response...been away on holidays...

all the users affected by this are members of plugdev on their machines

the puzzlement continues...

furthermore, a couple of the users were able to see these usb sticks automount when they logged into KDE instead of xfce...others not...

I've tried reinstalling kde-baseapps, kdelibs, nepomuk-core as some of the machines were giving errors related to missing libnepomukcore.so.4 and dolphinpart.so but no change

I'm stumped. These machines all worked fine prior to the last -current update.

I haven't been asking the right question or looking in the right places.

The issue is not one of automounting and the misunderstanding is mine.

What I've come to understand is that when inserting a usb stick, a function of thunar-volman is to put an icon on the xfce desktop. The drive has not actually been mounted yet, I've just received a visual notification that there's a drive which can be mounted. This isn't happening for these machines.

At this point I've done
#slackpkg reinstall Thunar
#slackpkg reinstall thunar-volman
#slackpkg reinstall xfce4

and I'm still not getting the icon popup indicating the presence of the stick, even though
#tail -n100 /var/log/messages
Mar 26 10:17:26 hera kernel: [ 100.155109] usb 1-3: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci-pci
Mar 26 10:17:26 hera kernel: [ 100.450065] usb 1-3: new high-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-pci
Mar 26 10:17:26 hera kernel: [ 100.743095] usb 3-1: new full-speed USB device number 3 using uhci_hcd
Mar 26 10:17:27 hera kernel: [ 100.877110] usb 3-1: not running at top speed; connect to a high speed hub
Mar 26 10:17:27 hera kernel: [ 100.911119] usb 3-1: New USB device found, idVendor=090c, idProduct=1000
Mar 26 10:17:27 hera kernel: [ 100.911130] usb 3-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Mar 26 10:17:27 hera kernel: [ 100.911135] usb 3-1: SerialNumber: 12052403053066
Mar 26 10:17:27 hera kernel: [ 100.914286] usb-storage 3-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
Mar 26 10:17:27 hera kernel: [ 100.914586] scsi6 : usb-storage 3-1:1.0
Mar 26 10:17:27 hera mtp-probe: checking bus 3, device 3: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb3/3-1"
Mar 26 10:17:27 hera mtp-probe: bus: 3, device: 3 was not an MTP device
Mar 26 10:17:27 hera dbus[669]: [system] Activating service name='org.blueman.Mechanism' (using servicehelper)
Mar 26 10:17:28 hera kernel: [ 102.241194] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
Mar 26 10:17:28 hera kernel: [ 102.248169] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 15155200 512-byte logical blocks: (7.75 GB/7.22 GiB)
Mar 26 10:17:28 hera kernel: [ 102.251154] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Mar 26 10:17:28 hera kernel: [ 102.278194] sdb: sdb1
Mar 26 10:17:28 hera kernel: [ 102.301183] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

it appears this is an xfce problem, so I'll look elsewhere for an answer

Anyone come up with any recent insight on this? I'm having the same problem in XFCE and KDE on -current.

CDROMs automount fine though - OP, do CDROMs work for you?

I am already a member of the plugdev group though, again, as I've mentioned already in a previous thread, I don't believe that group is necessary any longer.