I've just upgraded from 10.2 to 11.0 and I've noticed that I've gained an extra folder in /, namely /media. The way my system was set up in 10.2 means that all my mount points are in /mnt, and not /media. The upgrade hasn't changed this, so I'm wondering if it's ok to remove the /media folder as I like a lean, mean slackware machine?

Sure you can. But does it really make a difference beyond the measly 4K it takes up on disk?

Well, no, probably not. The only thing that annoys me about it slightly is that when I type "mount /mnt/usb", if I only have mnt in /, then I can autocomplete mnt having only typed the m, rather than having to type mount /mn, and then autocompleting. These things bug me

Ah yes, that would bug me too. I'm sure that you can tell zsh to ignore /media because my impression is that you can get the autocomplete to do anything from what I've heard. Not sure if you can do the same thing with bash.

So yeah, it does make a difference beyond the space on disk.

It bugs me too. I once expiermented with using a sed filter in my hal build script to replace /media with /mnt in the actuall source code. Good idea but I don't think it worked. I don't use hal anyway. I think you can safely delete it. Not only does the autocompletiion thing annoy me but I just don't like having 2 mount points there as well.

Neither do I.
What's with that folder anyway? I mean, if I'm already used to mount and umount everything fine through desktop links and proper fstab permissions, that /media folder is practically useless to me and, I dare to believe, to most slackers.

Try to tell that to an Ubuntu user

I use zsh anyway, so I'll have a look into that (for other things since I'm going to get rid of /media). Glad I'm not the only one that thinks like this!

To understand the inclusion of /media, see the 'Nix Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS):

Media Mount Point

I don't know slack, but here's what I know about /media (Mandriva uses /mnt too):
- /media is the standard location for removable mount points according to the LSB.
- /media is the only place that pmount/pumount look at if you want to use them, and they're indeed very useful in concordance with the new HAL+DBUS.

The way I did was to:
- remove /media entirely,
- get the pmount source RPM (source .tgz in slack?), patch the source to replace all occurences of /media with /mnt, rebuild the binary RPM from that, and install this modified version.

Now I use /mnt only, and pmount/pumount are happy with that.

Yves.

Yes. It won't affect anything.

But, it will make a difference in the future. Once HAL & pmount become part of Slackware, the /media directory will have a proper purpose.

What I've ended up doing is just moving it into /root, so that if I need it in the future, then I can just move it back to /.

Thanks for all your responses folks