Gentoo+KDE and USB drives

[riaan]

Hi All

I've run into a snag. After regularly upgrading Gentoo on my Laptop I've suddenly lost the ability to automount USB drives on the Laptop while running Gentoo (~x86). Mounting them manually works fine.

On my office PC I've updated everything with equal regularity as well and automounting USB drives works fine. It has its own problem, however, it intermittently fails to mount one, or more of my filesystems at bootup.

I'm now wondering if these are not similar symptoms for the same problem on two different machines, or not.

Possible culprits: HAL, udev, baselayout, kernel compile options, a missed/changed config file, ...

I'm running baselayout 2.0.0 on my office PC and 1.12.12 on my laptop (I've masked v2).

Any ideas where to look (or Google) for the cause of these buggerup(s)?

Regards
Riaan

P.S. Serves me right for running unstable/testing (~x86) branch. :-(
RS

[madryn]

Hi

Are you having KDE do the automount?

Or are you doing it with an automount daemon? Or the kernel Automount module?

This might be useful:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_D-BUS_Session_Bus_with_KDM

/m

[riaan]

Hi Madryn

Thanks for replying.

I let KDE do the automounting of USB storage devices, CDs, etc. AFAIK KDE-3.5 employs HAL to accomplish this. I don't really understand how D-Bus ties into HAL and/or DCOP. It sounds to me that D-Bus and DCOP does similar things - alowing applications to communicate with one another - so it might not be related to automounting USB devices at all. Anyway, be that as it may, everything usually works like a charm (2 home PCs & my office PC) except for my laptop where it has worked in the past, but just stopped working some time ago for some unknown reason.

On my office desktop the fixed drive partitions are mounted in the usual way by the /etc/init.d/localmount script in the "boot" runlevel. For some reason it does not mount the local partitions most of the time, but every now and then it does so successfully. (?!?) My second Mandriva installation on the same PC has no such problems - so it doesn't seem to be a hardware problem.

I have checked out the link you suggested and will try it out tomorrow or so, and see if it helps.

Any way if all else fails I'll reinstall Gentoo - I've been meaning to go Gentoo 64-bit on my office PC (like the one at home) anyway and I might do the same on my laptop while I'm at it. I just need a week or so to do 2 Gentoo installs! ;-)

Thanks again
Riaan