announce: usbmount for Slackware 12.2
 

As I neither use KDE nor Gnome, the HAL based mounting of USB devices is not working right out of the box for me in Slackware 12.2.
The ivman+pmount approach described in http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d-this-566862/ looks a little complicated. Personally, I prefer the simple udev based way used in Debian for non Desktop environment users (provided by usbmount Debian package).

There used to be a port of this package from Debian to Slackware, as some search revealed (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5/#post2776715), but the web site pointed out there is gone now.

So I put together the required components from Debian's usbmount package and a little install shell script for Slackware 12.2:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/usbmount-slackware

This sounds like an interesting project, but could you describe the usage and configuration in detail? I'm happy with pmount, but it is currently a little crippled in the kernel in Slackware 12.2.

USBmount is intended for users which don't work with a Desktop environment like KDE or Gnome. It auto-mounts new USB mass storage devices when they are plugged in to the first available mountpoint (selected from /media/usb[0-7] by default).
Syncing and unmounting should be performed by other means (e.g. sudo -> umount). To prevent stale mounts, usbmount issues an unmount when it detects removal of a mounted USB device, however.
It's a port of the Debian USBmount package. Filesystems to consider, mount points, mount options, etc. can be controlled via /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf file. Unlike the original package, this port to Slackware 12.2 enables vfat (besides ext2 and ext3) by default. So even without customization, this package should provide reasonable automount support for most use cases right out of the box. USBmount uses udevd rules to implement automounting, so HAL is not required (but may be activated -- without a HAL event subscriber nothing happens on USB device plug in).
For more information see the README file for the Slackware port and the original README.debian file included in the package.

One feature I think would be useful is some sort of filtering to control the automounting using the name or the serial number of the device. For examples additional rules like 'mount device xyz always to /mnt/xyz and not to first available /media/usb[0-7]' or 'don't automount device abc' should be possible. This is not yet implemented.

I use this port with Slackware 12.2.0. Other versions than 12.2 may work, but are not touched with the currently supplied install shell script. If someone likes to adapt and test with other versions, I'm happy to include them.

For download and notification of new releases I've set up a freshmeat project page: http://freshmeat.net/projects/usbmount-slackware/