First off, let me say that I've read, re-read, and again read the sticky re:Hal and 12.0. Many times in the past, and again today.

I've just completed a fresh 12.2 install (having borked a perfect 12.0 install...don't ask.)

Anyway, I have an Archos 605 pmp, and under 12.0, using ivman and pmount, I was, for the most part, able to have my pmp automounted, whether in X or at the cli. This enabled me to do nightly syncs and playlist generation via cron. For the most part, due in large part to the sticky (thanx folks!) I don't recall it being particularly difficult.

However, upon trying to accomplish the same feat in 12.2, I feel defeated. Nothing I tried would work all the time. Formerly, when I plugged in the pmp, it would be read as /dev/sd? and auto-mounted to /media/A605. It's because of this behaviour that I was able to create scripts, and to invoke them via cron.

In 12.2, sometimes the device would be seen as /dev/sda1, and mounted /media/A605; other times mounted as /media/sda1; other times not mounted at all, unless & until I clicked on it in Thunar, or manually mounted it via cli. Unmounting also proved to be an issue. Sometimes pmount would allow it - other times it would error out, saying I wasn't the one who mounted it.

In running ivman, I could see that there were sometimes mounting issues (via pmount); sometimes it wouldn't mount because it was determined that is wasn't a removable device. I could whitelist the pmp in pmount.allow, but it would have to be as /dev/sda1. Labels & UUIDs weren't allowed.

Of course the major issue in this case, besides not being certain that the device was mounted at all, is that I couldn't be sure that the device would be read as /dev/sda1, especially if there were other usb storage devices in play.

Getting to the point - I ended up putting a line in fstab:

and I created a udev rule, 99-mount.rules:
This, apparently, does the trick.

I'm curious as to whether this is the way it's all supposed to work, or what I may have missed in the first place, or whether there's any drawbacks to what I've done.

cheers,

Other possibility: add a 70-persistent-multimedia.rules similar to 70-persistent-cd.rules or 70-persistent-net.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/

Just so you know, pmount is a little limited in Slackware 12.2

Ah, I see. Thank you for pointing that out to me.

Your suggestion about using globs in pmount.all may have sped up resolution for me (had I searched LQ for a solution - what a novel idea, search LQ!)

However, I think when all is said & done, the fstab > udev solution is the tidiest and most reliable.

cheers,

There has been a discussion on the Slackbuilds-users mailing list about pmount and the problematic detection of removable devices via hal.

It ended up -- as I wished -- that a Slackbuild for pmount is still maintained, but with a warning about that in the README:As a fluxbox user I do find pmount/pumount very useful. There is the content of my /etc/pmount.allow file:As you can see you can use pmount for removable and not removable devices as well (/dev/hda4 is a disk partition with an old version of Slackware in it)