I haven't found a good howto on this. I've been using slackware exclusively but then I played around with other distributions lately after an old hard-drive fell in my lap. Anyway, I was using Ubuntu both 6.06 and 6.10 and they have the coolest feature.

When you plug in a USB drive or a CD, it detects that something's been inserted and it automatically mounts it in /media as well as places an icon on the desktop.

Is it possible to get this working in Slackware 11?

Here's what I know:
1) the /etc/fstab does NOT have to have the drive information present. I've used that in the past to manually mount drives, but ubuntu can do it automatically.

Somehow GNOME receives an event from the USB controller or CD drive that a change has occurred and will automatically create a directory for the device in /media, mount it at that point, and place an icon on the desktop. Does KDE have a similar feature? How does one configure it?

Thanks for the help!

you need dbus, dbus-qt3 , udev and hal and change some compile options for kde (slackware's packages don't support it)

fortunately linuxpackages.net has already packages for it. be sure to only grab the kjz packages.

This functionality is added by hal & dbus, which are not yet available in official Slackware package format.

That said, you can take the advice of erklaerbaer and get the packages needed from Linuxpackages.net. It is an extremely handy feature to have, because it recognises all forms of removable media, including CDs & DVDs, cameras, USB sticks, portable hard drives, etc.

Slackware 11 was released as a Linux-2.4 centric distro. As such, it does support Linux-2.6 and works with it, but doesn't make full use of all of the features offered by Linux-2.6, such as hal & dbus support.

At a guess, the next Slackware release will have to offer dbus support as a minimum, because KDE 4 uses it in place of dcop. This could mean the end for Linux-2.4 support in Slackware (if you want to use the GUI, that is).

Thanks for the replies! I'll get right on it. I do have a few questions. I generally compile my own kernels, and was wondering what kind of support I need to include to get HAL, dbus, and udev working? I've got USB HID, USB mass storage, SCSI emulation, SCSI support, and SCSI disk support enabled, but I didn't include any of the numerous USB device options.

Does the HAL provide device drivers? or are those still provided by the kernel but the HAL auto loads appropriate kernel modules?

Thanks for the help!

Sounds like you have pretty much everything covered.

As for the USB device drivers, it depends upon what you want to to. If you're not 100% sure of what devices you may be connecting to the machine in the short-term future, then you probably should set all of the USB device drivers to compile as modules.
HAL doesn't provide any drivers. Drivers are usually provided by the kernel. Kernel modules are still auto-loaded by 'kmod'.

HAL is an acronym for 'Hardware Abstraction Layer'. And that is exactly what it is. It provides the means for software to communicate directly with the hardware. Nothing more.

As with many things Unix, each component of Project Utopia does a specific job which is fairly narrow in scope.