memory stick
 

I have a simple question (I hope):

How do I get my system to identify and use a memory stick?

Install hotplug and then mount your memory stick. To make mounting easier you can add a line for your memory stick into /etc/fstab.

details...
 

Thanks for the reply.
But can you break it down a bit for me? I'm not so good at these types of things.

I do have hotplug, and I know how to make an entry into fstab (basically). What I don't know is how to find the stick. In other posts, it talks about /sda, but that's not on my system.
Where is it going to be?

Thanks.

Using /dev/sda1 seems to work for my memory stick (or "usbkey" or whatever they call it). Try that.

progress
 

Yup, that worked. Thanks.

One more question: if I put the mount command in fstab, and the stick is not in the drive, will there be a problem? (I may not always have the stick in the drive when I boot.)

Also, once this is setup, I assume I can take the stick out and put it in at will when the machine is on. Yes?

I don't know what will happen when your Linux kernel tries to boot a device that is not where it's supposed to be according to fstab (probably it just gives an error message) but I REALLY don't think that it's a good idea to remove the memory stick without unmounting it first.

Here's the fstab line for my memory stick:

/dev/sda1 /media/usbkey vfat rw,user,noauto 0 0

The "noauto" option means that it won't be mounted unless I use the "mount /media/usbkey" command. After doing "umount /media/usbkey" it's safe to remove the memory stick. And I can do this all as normal user, so it's really not much trouble at all.

And, to make things even easier, I've got on my wmaker desktop an icon to launch the "xvmount" program, which is a graphical frontend for mounting removable media. Xvmount is a handy utility, not only for mounting and unmounting my memory stick but also for quickly checking the current state of cdrom, floppy, and memory stick -- are they currently mounted or unmounted?

Some people like to dabble with error-prone automounting solutions but I find it safer to follow the KISS (Keep It Simple & Stable) principle. It's a bit more trouble to manually mount/unmount removable media, but it works every time.