Does kioslave actually monitor the system-wide messagebus for HAL messages? Maybe you can monitor it in the same way that I do with gnome-volume-manager.

If it didn't, then how does it handle the cdrw in exactly the fashion I want the pen drive handled?

I'm not trying to be a smart-a**, I just am really trying to find out...

It sounds like you have all the fundamentals sorted. Your issue seems to be with kdebase.

To get it working, I downloaded the source for Pat's kdebase-3.5.2 package from a local slackware mirror and edited the slackbuild script to include "--with-hal" in the configure step. Then I ran the slackbuild script and left it going while I watched TV. It took about 40 minutes to complete on my 3.2GHz P4 machine, but was well and truly worth the wait.

All you really need on a vanilla Slackware-current installation (as at 14th May 2006) is dbus, hal, sysfsutils, pmount & a re-compiled kdebase-3.5.2 package.

Please note that I now have it working properly with Pat's udev-071 package which is allegedly "broken". Using udev-092 caused some quirky behaviour.

Compiling hal requires some trickery, but isn't difficult once you figure it out. And it can all be done while the kernel-headers-2.4.x package is left in place.

I'm still working on the libgphoto thing, but ATM I have it working from the root account. I think it's just a matter of messing with some udev rules.

Hopefully I'll have a page up by the end of this week with all the fine details. I wanna get the kinks ironed out first.

Ciao,

I'd like to see the exact steps you took. I have installed the latest versions of hal, dbus, etc., except for keeping Pat's udev. Maybe my problem lies in only rebuilding kioslave/media, instead of the whole kdebase package. I will try rebuilding the whole thing.

I did reconfigure before rebuilding, though, with the '--with-hal' option; it is not greyed out in kcontrol, and my cdrw works just as it should, but maybe something else is not catching the usb callouts. Also, just rebuilding kioslave/media worked fine with fstab-sync on a previous version of hal for me, but I am moving to pmount since hal doesn't support fstab-sync anymore. I just made a static link to /dev/sda1 on my desktop, but I would like to get it working as it should, especially if I ever need to plug in more than one usb device at a time in front of the people I always extol linux to

There are some packages here:

http://web.tiscali.it/meskalamdug/kdeautom.html

which worked for me out-of-the-box with a clean install of -current. I wanted to try someone else's packages before spending too much time on this. These packages are the only ones I could get working initially. The problem is that they supply udev-092.

The web page is in Italian, but Google is able to translate it quite well.
You will. I want to make sure I can get libgphoto working properly with udev first, then I'll post a complete step-by-step guide.

That's very good news. I'm glad that you figured it out. I am anxious to hear if everything is working as it should. Props on the excellent work, guys.

Slackware Current's Udev 071 does indeed appear to have some of the required fixes. It appears that he may have taken a different approach to loading firmware, but it looks good. The biggest issue was the stuff that was commented out in the udev.rules in Slackware 10.2, which is the main reason why we built our own. I'm glad that you found that Current's pack has these changes.

Well, I got libgphoto working the way it should. The thing is, I set it up to use hotplug instead of udev. I think it still isn't ready for udev just yet. All the libgphoto packages I could find use hotplug anyway, so what's the point in making life difficult for myself? I might have another go at making it work with udev in a few months. I could get it to work with udev, but not from a normal user's account.

Something else has popped up, and I'm not sure if it is an issue with my computer or the software. Under KDE, if I insert an audio CD a dialog pops up asking what I want to do. Good. I can tell it to play the CD and it does.

The problem occurs while the CD is playing. If I insert a USB key or mount/unmount a hard drive the CD stops playing. Stone dead. I can't even eject the disc. The 'fuser' command tells me that there are 3 processes using the CD drive. If I kill those processes, then I can eject the CD.

Weird huh? So, I tried disabling HAL & DBUS and reverting back to Autofs. Guess what? It still happens. If I disable all forms of auto mounting if doesn't happen. I'm thinking there must be something wrong with my hardware combo. As I was drifting off to sleep last night I thought about maybe disabling the "Poll CDROM drives" option under KDE - which I'll try when I get home from work.

I just wanted to see if anyone else has seen this behaviour before and if so, what they did to fix it.

Quick Screenie of my progress so far with kde and automount...
Took me a matter of a few hours in which most was compiling
kde's required stuff aka arts, kdelibs, and kdebase.

Kde automount screenshot...

Basically my steps in a nutshell...

Make sure a halfway working udev is present. I'd suggest dlg's udev
since the one in slack is a moch...

Get hal/dbus installed and running properly... Make sure to enable qt3 in the
dbus build or you will get absolutely nowhere..

I have built my stuff with pam installed but have yet to check if
the automount stuff is actually relying on it. So this may be hit
and miss on this...

rebuild kdebase so that it builds with hal/dbus support..

Install pmount.. no special configs should be needed for this.. I didn't need any.

Install ivman for automounting of devices.. usb seems to do fine with just hal/dbus
but cd's/dvd's you aren't so lucky. Ivman uses pmount in about the same way that
gnome uses gnome-mount to mount devices. Without ivman you will get an icon on your
desktop but it won't be mounted.

run ivman --system during boot with an initscript and also run ivman in your kde
session.

This is just a very generic explanation of how I got this running. I'm assuming
since you are all slackers that finding more detailed info shouldn't be a problem.

Good luck....

Could you try plugging in a USB key while playing an Audio CD.

If I do this, the CD stops playing and I haven't been able to figure out why.

Yes I get same behavior.. If you notice, when inserting a usb stick,
it seems as though it tries to remount the cdrom. I'll look around for
a patch for this if there is one. Really looks as though there won't be
a real stable qt/dbus interface until kde4 is out using the qt4 bindings.

Yes. It seems to "re-probe" the CD, which causes it to stop playing.

I've tried changing the "Enable Polling CD ROM drives" setting to no avail.
I wonder if this problem happens under GNOME too?

Nope, but we don't use pmount on a default DLG install (since we have gnome-mount or gnome-volume-manager to handle it). I think that Stik uses pmount on his custom GNOME system though.

I'm using gnome-mount now but I didn't have any issues with using pmount
either.. This is an issue with kde itself.

Thanks for clearing that up.

I tried disabling HAL and running without any form of auto mounting. Running that way, I can (manually) mount USB keys without causing the Audio CD to stop playing. However, if I attempt to access the "Storage Media" folder (or media:/) the CD still stops playing. This occurs even while HAL is disabled.

Upon searching the KDE bug database, I found that there was an open bug report about this, to which I've added a comment:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121405

Let's hope it is fixed soon.