Having got used to the luxury back in the Bad Old Days when I used Mandrake (I have since seen the light), I have always used the supermount kernel patch to allow automatic mounting and unmounting of removable media.

Having decided to give the 2.6 kernel a try, I tried to find a version of the patch for the 2.6.7 kernel (the official one is only for 2.6.3), and while I did eventually find one here, I also came across the submount project, which attempts to do much the same thing.

Does anyone have any experience of both systems, and if so, how do they compare with each other? Which would you recommend I use?

I use submount on my gentoo kernel. It seems like supermount is becoming obsolete and being replaced by submount because they are slow in keeping up with new kernels. Also the fstab entries for submount are MUCH more logical and smaller than the gibberish in supermount entries. As for the technical aspects, I really don't know how either works, so I can't help you there. But if you want to use bleeding edge kernels use submount.

Hey all. I installed Slackware 10.0 over the weekend and it is good. I just installed submount with kernel 2.6.7 recompiled for my Athlon XP processor and so far seems to run pretty decent. It took me a couple of hours to get the right /etc/fstab config and now I can eject the cd and reinsert without problems. I never thought I'd see the day my Slack install has automounting. It's so Windows-like I'm wondering if on next reboot I'll see a "My Computer" icon on my desktop. Nah!

If I encounter any problems I'll let you know. Good luck and may Mr Volkerding shine his slacky goodness on your compiling!

***here's how I modified my /etc/fstab for cdrom***
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom subfs fs=cdfss,users,exec,unhide,ro 0 0