automounter utilities without HAL
Posted: Mon May 23, 2011 2:24 pm
I've been looking into automounter utilities that don't require HAL and might work outside of
X in console mode as well as in X from within Openbox. I use am-utils (Berkeley automounter) on my laptop
with FreeBSD and it seems to be helpful. I'm currently trying to set up Debian on my desktop and I noticed
there's a version of am-utils in the packages. I also read about autofs which seems to be similar to am-utils.
One feature about both of these that might be helpful on some systems is that they automatically unmount
devices if you don't use them for a while. At the moment, I'm using usbmount on the Debian machine and it's working fine for USB drives. I did read that there's no longer a current maintainer though. A few other options I saw mentioned on the Arch Linux forum are uam and udiskie. The uam option looks like it has few dependencies, but udiskie uses udisks which
appears to use policykit. The Arch wiki also has examples of integration with Openbox. There's also a sample
udev utility using yad for the interface at http://code.google.com/p/yad/wiki/USBFlash which doesn't appear to need
too many dependencies.
Just wondering if anyone's had any experience with these or other lightweight solutions that don't require HAL.
Would be interested in hearing about the pros and cons on any of these. Would also be interested to hear how others have
set their systems up when it comes to automounting. Does anyone just use /etc/fstab instead? That seems like the
easiest solution until you have to deal with a lot of different plug and play devices that might be added or removed at any
time. On my desktop system, I not only have USB devices to swap in and out, but also swappable SATA hard drives
that I need to keep track of. I'd like to find some simple solutions to keep all the drive names straight and ease mounting
and unmounting tasks. Would very much like to hear what others have uncovered on this issue. Thanks.
X in console mode as well as in X from within Openbox. I use am-utils (Berkeley automounter) on my laptop
with FreeBSD and it seems to be helpful. I'm currently trying to set up Debian on my desktop and I noticed
there's a version of am-utils in the packages. I also read about autofs which seems to be similar to am-utils.
One feature about both of these that might be helpful on some systems is that they automatically unmount
devices if you don't use them for a while. At the moment, I'm using usbmount on the Debian machine and it's working fine for USB drives. I did read that there's no longer a current maintainer though. A few other options I saw mentioned on the Arch Linux forum are uam and udiskie. The uam option looks like it has few dependencies, but udiskie uses udisks which
appears to use policykit. The Arch wiki also has examples of integration with Openbox. There's also a sample
udev utility using yad for the interface at http://code.google.com/p/yad/wiki/USBFlash which doesn't appear to need
too many dependencies.
Just wondering if anyone's had any experience with these or other lightweight solutions that don't require HAL.
Would be interested in hearing about the pros and cons on any of these. Would also be interested to hear how others have
set their systems up when it comes to automounting. Does anyone just use /etc/fstab instead? That seems like the
easiest solution until you have to deal with a lot of different plug and play devices that might be added or removed at any
time. On my desktop system, I not only have USB devices to swap in and out, but also swappable SATA hard drives
that I need to keep track of. I'd like to find some simple solutions to keep all the drive names straight and ease mounting
and unmounting tasks. Would very much like to hear what others have uncovered on this issue. Thanks.