Using Kubuntu 6.06 with a PQi Travel Flash smart card reader on USB2.

First time I plug it in it shows on my desktop. Unplug then replug, it doesn't show. Why is that? Can I force the system to scan for the drive?

Second, I have created a second user on the system and the reader won't show up there at all. This seems like a problem with permissions, but how do I identify the USB drive to give User 2 permission to read and write?

thx

for the 1st question:
Did you eject the card? Did you just pull it out or did you use the context menu to eject it then pul it out?

for the 1nd question:
is the user a member of the plugdev group, if not add them to it so they can use the device. Also unless you create a common group for the users and add that to the option in fstab, the card will mount so that only the user that mounted it can use it.

I had been using the "safely remove" command before pulling the card from the reader.

Both users are members of plugdev. Further, I had created a group called "smartcard", added both users as members, and associated that group with /dev/sdc1 [ the reader ]. As root, I changed the owner to the other user, and even changed the permissions on the command line as root to 0777, and still when I right click on properties, then permissions, it will report the wrong user as owner, and group rw privileges as forbidden.

I have not done an entry in fstab -- I thought I read somewhere fstab entries for USB devices were a bad idea. Do you have an example I can try? ## thanx

With my card reader, as long as I use "safely remove", another icon comes up on the desktop when another card is inserted. Dose anything show up in (in konqueror) system:/media ?

Normally using fstab for USB devices is a bad idea because the names are assigned in order of detection, but as the card reader is always in and always has the same address it's ok.
changing the permissions on /dev/sdc1 won't help because 1 when the card is removed /dev/sdc1 will disappear and 2 your not accessing the device your accessing the filesystem (to which the permissions are assigned).
You could create a fstab entry like:

Thanks for all the help; the fstab line did the trick.

Just for the record, the fstab I used was
/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 vfat nouato,users,gid=smartcard 0 0

Tested on both user accounts, safely removed and reinserted a few times on each, works fine.

thanks again ...

http://images.linuxquestions.org/que...ilies/nono.gif typo correction [ for future generations of readers ] :

/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 vfat noauto,users,gid=smartcard 0 0


thanx