LinLog

Quickly following up on yesterday's tip to newbies, the advent of HAL and volume managers means that you no longer have to do things like mess around with udev scripts to accomplish automounting and such.

See, this is the beauty of HAL. At the system level, all it does is keep an up-to-date list of hardware. That's all. The HAL daemon just tracks when devices are added, removed, or changed and doesn't actually do anything.

All the actual actions are carried out by client applications, such as the desktop volume manager. The beauty of using a volume manager is that it's just a regular program run by a regular user. That means that you can customize things on a per-user basis without even needing root access. You can even run more than one of them if you really want.

So if you're trying to set up auto-mounting or some form of auto-execution, just use your freakin' volume manager. Don't mess around with udev or hotplug scripts. Don't use old solutions like the autorun program or supermount. Just use the HAL solution. And if distribution you use for your desktop doesn't support HAL, then I suggest you change distributions. Handling removable drives no longer sucks in the Linux world and there's no point in suffering when you don't have to.