I know this is a stupid question but googling failed me. Sorry in advance.

So I have slackware 10.0 and the 2.4.* kernel that came with the slackware CD and I want to mount an external usb drive ... a dvd burner actually. In my previous distro I used udev rules to do this. My understanding is that the 2.4 kernel uses hotplug. I've never used hotplug. Did some googling and a man page read but I'm still not sure how go go about it.

I was just trying to figure out this exact situation today.

Hopefully we'll kil two birds with one stone here.

-Brian

After connecting the drive check the dmesg output. It'll tell you wether it's been detected and assigned a device name and so on. Then you can mount the device if necessary (depending on your need). Assuming it's detected as /dev/sda and your mount point is /mnt/dvdrw, mounting would be:

cd) dvd) Of course if it's detected as a different device name use it instead of sda, and if your mount point is not /mnt/dvdrw use yours. If you're just playing audio cds or dvd movies mounting isn't necessary, but you should still check to make sure it's detected.

Burning is another issue altogether and I don't know much about using external burners. I remember that for internal burners with a 2.4 kernel an extra boot parameter (as well as certain scsi kernel modules) was required, something like hdc=ide-scsi. 2.6 replaced this with ide-cd which is actually handled automatically. You might do some searching to see if ide-scsi is necessary for external drives. If so it could be tricky if you have other usb devices that cause the drive to occasionally be assigned a different device name.

keep in mind too that your device may very well be /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1 or etc. etc. My external usb hd and flash drives are mounted this way. Once you determine the order of the, you can easily set them up to be mounted at boot in your fstab file.

Well I had an innovate solution to this problem. A friend of mine has a cable internet connection so I was able to get the slackware 11.0 ISOs (five minutes per CD - Wow ... would have taken me about two months to get). So now I'm in slack 11, using udev in a 2.6 kernel. Udev is something I know from before ... so my problem now is solved.