Debian, Hotplug and Gnome-volume-manager mini-HOWTO
James Ballantine, james at ballantine.com.au
2005-03-02
Objective
Under Debian and Gnome 2.8+, to have media such as CDs and USB drives appear automatically on the desktop when inserted.
Required Debian packages
- gnome
- hotplug
- udev
- pmount
- gnome-volume-manager
Procedure
Begin by installing the above packages and any dependencies they have. Gnome-volume-manager is a part of the Gnome metapackage, I believe.
Udev
Udev is the new management system for /dev. It dynamically creates device nodes under /dev as they become available. Testing to see whether you have it working is quite simple:
- Grab a normal USB thumb drive
- As root,
tail -f /var/log/messages
- In another terminal,
ls /dev/sd*
- plug in your thumb drive and wait for a line like
kernel: sda: sda1... in your messages terminal.
- Do
ls /dev/sd* again.
If you have an extra entry in your listing now, representing the new drive you plugged in, udev is behaving correctly.
Gnome-volume-manager
The main difficulty here is that your user needs to be a part of the group 'plugdev' to use gnome-volume-manager, but it doesn't tell you. So first of all, add yourself to the plugdev group. Imagining your name is mary, edit /etc/group as root and find the line that begins with plugdev, something like plugdev:x:113:. Add yourself to it, like this: plugdev:x:113:mary, and then reboot.
Difficulties with Gnome-volume-manager
Supposing that doesn't work, in order to get gnome-volume-manager to print its errors, do something like the following, as your normal user inside a gnome session:
- plug in a usb stick
killall gnome-volume-managergnome-volume-manager
This should induce the volume manager to print its errors to stdout for you to read (this was how I discovered that it doesn't have rights to mount things without being a member of plugdev).