How to fight a pcmcia media reader and winMonday, August 14. 2006
My new laptop running ubuntu has no builtin media reader like the last one and I wanted some way to put pics on the machine without hooking the camera up via usb. I hate doing that.
There are usb pen drives that use sd cards but I found a cheaper solution. A 6 in 1 media reader in a pcmcia card. I picked one up for $7 plus shipping on ebay. The card works fine except for one minor problem. Ubuntu fails to automount this card reader like it does USB devices since it is detected as a non removeable ide drive. I could manually mount/unmount it but I really like ubuntu's (gnomes) automounting feature so I started looking into the reason it wasn't getting automounted. Ubuntu uses several seperate peices of software to auto mount devices so it is neccesary to know which one is failing to get things fixed. After posting a message on All Things Unix I was lucky to find someone who had an idea for me. His idea was that I needed to setup a policy for hal to enable automounting of the device. The command lshal shows that hal thinks the reader is not a removeable device so we must tell hal differently. At his suggestion I made a file called /etc/hal/fdi/policy/21-flash-reader.fdi . In that file is a recipe for telling hal this is a removeable drive. There doesn't seem to be a lot of information on the web about hal policy but after doing a bit more searching to get the syntax right I created the 21-flash-reader.fdi file. Right click the file name to save it. BTW, The match statements must match what is listed by lshal in order for hal to take the changes. After restarting the hal daemon, lshal now listed the device as removeable but It still wouldn't automount.  Back to the forums for some more help. Finally I was told to edit /etc/pmount.allow and add a line with the device name for the device. In this case that is /dev/hde1. After I did this the reader is automounting just fine. Hopefully this will help someone else in the same situation. Thanks to salahx and shrtckt for the help. Trackbacks
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Thanks, Alex for the info on hotplugging what the system would not recognize as a hotpluggable device.
Please note that the file in which to add the device is /etc/pmount.allow, as seen in 'man pmount', and as I'm sure you've done. As to your question in the forum with Salahx, IMHO, no automounting would occur without the 'preferences.fdi' file. The /pmount.allow entry only *allows* the mounting with 'pmount', but the hal policy file is required for the system to trigger this. Otherwise, you need to manually 'pmount'. How about testing it...? The question remains, where does all this stuff get configured for devices which *are* recognized by the system? I'm studying this. Learnt a great deal from your post. Jackn
Thanks for pointing out the typo, It is /etc/pmount.allow not /etc/pmount . Now it is fixed.
If I get some time I will test it without the hal policy file but I too believe it to be neccesary. It seems to me that detailed info on hald seems to be sketchy on the internet. It is a fairly new system so I am sure more efforts are going into polishing it than documenting it. As to your question I don't know anything definitave but look at the stuff in /usr/share/hal and /usr/lib/hal I think you will find the answer there. |
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