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Trever Fischer is a junior at The University of Akron
with a strong enthusiasm towards coding, writing, photography, and above all: oranges.
This is his site. Specifically, this is his "About" box. In addition to recently having finished his first year of college,
he is also a full-time hacker who tinkers with Amarok, Plasma, various KDE bits, and PHP.
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Device automounting in KDE 4.4
Here’s a picture:
Here’s a link: http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase/runtime/solid-device-automounter/
If thats not enough, then here’s some words:
Juuuuuust before the last day of classes before thanksgiving break at Akron, and before the hard freeze I moved device-automounter out of kdereview and into kdebase. The screenshot above shows the configuration page, which is off by default.
A few people might be wondering why, but this mail in the kdereview thread probably explains the background a bit. In my opinion, it just isn’t an easily solvable problem right now. I’m leaving it up to the distros to decide if they want it on/off by default (just hack lib/AutomounterSettingsBase.kcfg or create a proper kded_device_automounterrc config.)
Administrivia aside, the automounter has a little bit of intelligence in it (explained in the SETTINGS file). With all three boxes checked (my recommendation!), the following logic happens whenever it sees devices:
If a device has ever been mounted (specifically, ever mounted while device-automounter was around), it is tagged as ‘familiar’.
Device-automounter only cares if a device is ‘familiar’ if that second checkbox about manually mounted devices is checked. If checked, it only mounts familiar devices. Otherwise, it’ll mount everything. It might sound strange, but its useful to me when I plug in friend’s random devices on my laptop to let them charge, and I don’t want to have to make sure I ‘eject’ or ’safely remove’ or unmount them.
So now we just need some way to get the lower level bits (like DeviceKit) to do this stuff. Then maybe we’ll be a few years closer to catching up to 2009.
8 Responses to “Device automounting in KDE 4.4”
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Hey, that looks cool. Will it be possible to choose where the devices are mounted to? And which name is shown (some usb-devices have really crappy names, which seems like they can not be changed).
I suggest making your screenshot full size; the text is hard to read at small sizes. If you need free hosting, consider archive.org.
“It might sound strange, but its useful to me when I plug in friend’s random devices on my laptop to let them charge, and I don’t want to have to make sure I ‘eject’ or ’safely remove’ or unmount them.”
Makes me appreciate Android even more, not detecting as a storage device until you tell it to.
[...] Device automounting in KDE 4.4 [...]
wouldn’t it be better to move the “never mount new devices” option to last one?
I’m glad to get the device automounting feature finally in KDE. For most people who use a graphical desktop really necessary, I don’t know any non-developer who wants to mess around with manually mounting an external disk or a camera. Thanks
Just make sure we avoid AutoPlay-type activity, where the MS OS mounts its drives and runs whatever its told to. A bash script or other malicious file could quickly and easily wipe someone’s home directory. While ease-of-use is nice, we don’t want to emulate MS too much for a variety of reasons, security being the biggest…
Trever, I just wanted to say thank you for your Device Automounter. I think it’s a useful addition to KDE 4 and hopefully will make things easier for newcomers to Linux who happen to pick a KDE-based distro.