I'm dual booting Slackware and Mint at the moment. I installed Mint to try to work out some printing issues I had, but I have now run across something I find to be very cool indeed.

Mint automounts my usb attached digital camera for me. I tried mounting it in Slackware, but really had no idea where to even begin trying to mount it. I don't mind manually mounting, if I can figure out how, but automounting is very nice.

I used to use Linux, specifically Slackware, years ago when Slackware was still with Walnut Creek, but for one reason or another eventually went back to single booting Win.

Now, I'm determined to get rid of win entirely, once and for all, which means I need to work out all the issues that I would normally end up booting back into win for. Getting pics of my digital camera is one of them.

Any help, advice, or tips greatly appreciated.

What version of Slackware and what desktop are you using?
A complete install of Slackware and your camera should be automatically mounted.
In Slackware64-current and KDE 4.14.3, my camera is automatically mounted as a external storage device within seconds of plugging the cable into a USB port.

To enable auto-mounting in XFCE click on Applications---->Settings---->Settings Manager---->Removable drives and Media. Put a check mark beside the Removable Storage items you want to auto-mount. Done.

Ah, good points.

I am using Slackware64 -current, but i3 is my wm. I did use XFCE for awhile, but much prefer i3. I didn't think the wm would factor into automounting.
I did do a full install, and I'm using the Slackware Huge kernel. I used to compile my own kernel's, etc...but have since found that using the distro kernel leads to less problems in the long run.

I used lsusb, and that does list my camera, but it's not mounted, and I could not determine which device it would be for manually mounting it.

I prefer to use the CLI if at all possible, as I find it to be faster and easier to use.

Check dmesg to see what the device is likely called. If it is mtp/ptp based (rather than standard USB storage like a thumbdrive), it won't give you a drive designation (like /dev/sdd), but mtp-detect should dump a ton of info. With automounting, you'd also likely need to be a member of the proper group(s). The groups a standard user should be a part of are:

These are added with the adduser script by pressing the up arrow when it asks.

Automounting both my phone (mtp) and thumbdrives works properly for me using KDE. I've never used i3, so I'm not sure how limited it is to the WM/DE, but it might be worth trying a different one to see if it is a configuration issue or a limitation of i3.

gphoto2 may be what you're looking for.

See http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/...6/digicam.html

Okay, getting closer.

I switched over to XFCE, and it does indeed automount for me, as /dev/sdb1. I had checked dmesg, and this also showed it as being sdb1, but trying to manually mount it from the CLI gave me the error message that /dev/sdb1 does not exist!

Ideally, I want to be able to mount this and others myself, since I'm not always in X, and even when I am, i3 does not automount.


I can't seem to understand why it does not even exist from the command line, but it does according to which WM i'm using.

Back in i3, provide the relevant lines from dmesg for your device and your command used to try and mount the device with the error message. That might help us track down the issue.

Okay, made some progress thanks you guys/gals.

Ran lsmod and captured the output from the mounted and unmounted states:

Unmounted:

Module Size Used by
vfat 10415 0
fat 52764 1 vfat
uas 13331 0
usb_storage 51267 1 uas

Mounted:

Module Size Used by
vfat 10415 1
fat 52764 1 vfat
uas 13331 0
usb_storage 51267 2 uas

Those are the module differences, of course.

I also added a line to my /etc/fstab for mounting, using the same mount options that XFCE used:

/dev/sdb1 /media/usb vfat auto,rw,nodev,uid=0,gid=0,shortname=mixed,flush,uhelper=udisks2 0 0

So, it looks like I just need to load additional modules?

Modules should be handled automatically (plus, I don't see any difference between the unmounted and mounted entries). You certainly can put a line in your fstab, but if you have any other devices plugged in before you plug in your camera, it won't work. It'd probably be better to reference it by its UUID or label rather than /dev/sdb1, as those aren't as likely to cause conflicts.

You might want to look at https://udisks.freedesktop.org/docs/latest/ and the udisks command.

Desktop environments register for D-Bus events that indicate disks available for mounting.

Ah, that udisks looks pretty interesting. I'll start delving into that now.

That's also a good point about the fstab entry. I had not considered that different devices might or might not be plugged in. I'll change it to reference the UUID.b

AHA! Too cool. Changed the fstab to reference the UUID, and now I can mount/unmount from the cli. Absolutely perfect!

My undying gratitude to all you guys/gals, you saved me hours of trial and error, and I still learned a lot. Progress is being made.

'lsblk -a' lists all block devices, including those plugged in to USB, and shows which are mounted or available for mounting.

in my wm setup i use devmon from udevil package https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...?search=udevil

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