Hello,

USB storage devices (external hard drives and sticks) have never been working well with my slackware setup and I need help to figure it out. Searching these forums revealed nothing and a google search revealed a potential problem or misconfiguration with HAL (most references are on Gentoo or ArchLinux) but I am totally unable to deal with HAL as I have no idea how it works. I use Slackware 13.1 & XFCE 4.4 (probably outdated but once again upgrading seems to have its share of bugs and problems and seems to require tremendous efforts)

Basically, if I plug a USB stick to my slackware machine, half of the time I wont be able to use it as a normal user. I need to launch konqueror as root (kdesu konqueror) and move the files as root. It will work. Then I wont be able to unmount the device as a normal user. If I try, I get a popup saying:

I believe this is a permission problem.

If the drive was freshly formatted on a windows machine, and has not yet been mounted on linux, I will be able to use it as a normal user.

Does anyone know how to fix this so I can use my USB devices like with any other operating systems out there??

Thanks

As root Logout and log back in. Should work.

Sorry, this did not fix it... I typed the command above and it said that my user was added to the group plugdev.

Any other suggestions?

You'd need to log out and log in again for that change to take effect. Maybe that's why it didn't work.

Sorry I hit the quick reply too quick!

I did logout and back in... I however noticed that it takes forever (about 30 seconds) for the desktop to close and go to he login screen...

Bump.... Nobody?

Hello lpallard,
I don't think so. Note that HAL is less used with Slackware-13.37 than with 13.1.

With Gentoo I have once used halevt http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.37/system/halevt/ which can be configured to handle plugable devices automatically.

But I would recommend to upgrade to 13.37, hopefully you'll find a better solution for your problem after an upgrade.

Markus

markush, i've seen you around these forums quite a lot and I think you are probably ahead of me in most stuff, so here's a quick question for you:

Would upgrade to 13.37 be easy? I have been using slack for quite some time now but I am still unsure how to upgrade the whole OS properly... How do you upgrade from 13.1 to 13.37?

?

Did you try pmount? You can find it here.

Mh, the official way to upgrade from an earlier version to 13.37 is described here: ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/slackwar...37/UPGRADE.TXTI have three computers running Slackware, with one of them (which is my server) I used slackpkg to upgrade it. At first edit the /etc/slackpkg/mirrors file and change the mirrors path to 13.37, thenworked for me.

On the other two machines I performed a complete reinstall. I use to download the packages with wget and create a minimal-install-CD like described here: ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/slackwar...nux/README.TXT which means a bootable install-CD without any packages. And then I chose to install from premounted partition. My /home is a separate partition and is not reformatted. This installation is done within about 10 minutes.

Note that some of the configuration has changed from 13.1 to 13.37, for example referring to HAL, HAL does no longer manage the keybindings for the X-server.

Note as well, if you follow the manuals, most important this one ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/slackwar..._AND_HINTS.TXT you will not run into difficulties. And if something goes wrong, come here to ask.

Good luck.

Markus

1 members found this post helpful.

Again, thanks for replying!

I am just about to start using the readme from Pat you pointed out to me.

Before I start, I'd like to download (or mirror locally) the slackware 13.37 tree. What command you use?

Before I used rsync but I imagine there must be better than that. Also what I have done in the past is to download the ISO of the DVD, mount it locally and copy everything to my Slackware server (yes I too have a slackware server ! )

I've once written a short downloadscript, it is here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ckages-877572/ but the easiest method (with an ftp-mirror isIf you want to create a minimal install-CD you'll have to download the directories "Kernels" and "isolinux", which can be done with wget with the -r option.

Faster is creating a bootable installer on an USB-memory-stick which is explained here: ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/slackwar...README_USB.TXT

Note if you use my downloadscript, change the mirror in the configurationfile to an ftp-mirror near your home-location, it works only with ftp. And if you need the localization from the kdei-series you'll have to download it manually.

Markus

1 members found this post helpful.

Hey markush,

Everything went well except a problem with the new generic kernel 2.6.37.6-smp...

Basically my machine won't boot. I get a kernel panic saying cannot mount root fs invalid filesystem or something like that....

I am pretty sure it's because the generic kernel does not have support for reiserfs out of the box. I looked in the config file of this kernel and reiserfs seems to be modular (I.e. A module)

CONFIG_REISERFS_FS=m

My setup is as simple as it can be. One hdd with /boot on sda1 and root (/) on sda5.... All reiserfs partitions.

What can I do to boot?

Try these two commands.
(This assumes you have an "initrd = /boot/initrd.gz" line in lilo.conf already)

Hi lpallard,

I'm happy to read that you've got it working (so far). I don't use the generic kernel but the "huge" one. You didn't tell us anything about the hardware of your computer, what processor and what amount of Ram do you have?

Markus