Ok i'm a old time mandrake user, and i started to help a friend build a customized linux distribution based on debian unstable (munjoy linux) the kernel is built with supermount-ng wich i know that mandrake uses. Ok mdk uses supermount which is very simmilar in a lot of points with supermount-ng.

My questions is that i'm trying to automount usb-storage automatically on insert of a usb key or drive. so right now i have ended in /etc/hotplug/usb.agent and /etc/hotplug/usb/usb-storage
for running scripts on usb events and usb-storage detection , in thoses scripts i can put a lot of things i want in there like passive kde message to the user. But there is something i can't figure is how to know and how to automount the devices like Mandrake does. Personnaly i think Mandrake is the distribution who is doing the best job so far in automounting the devices. So i want to know how to automate the the mounting of such devices and how to make them usable by the user like mount it for the current user none for the root?.

Thanks for your help.

I don't know much about automounting -- I've never tried that because I've heard it's a very error-prone method to handle mounting. But perhaps I can help with the mounting devices as non-root user issue. All I had to do to use my usbkey was that I added the following line to fstab:

/dev/sda1 /media/usbkey vfat rw,user,noauto 0 0

Now mounting my usbkey is as simple as plugging the usbkey into the correct port and writing (as normal user) "mount /media/usbkey" (actually it's even simpler because I use a graphical frontend for the mount command, "xvmount"). It works perfectly here.

Additional info: I use Debian Sid with kernel-image-267-1-686 and I've installed Debian using the Sarge beta4 installer. I haven't installed any additional usb related packages (because usbkey is currently the only usb device that I use), I just have hotplug (and dependent packages) that came with the standard Sarge installation. My username is a member in "cdrom" and "floppy" groups, but I don't think this has any effect in mounting usbkey.

If you don't get automounting to work as you wish, you might want to consider using a graphical frontend (like xvmount) for allowing normal users to easily mount devices. Hope this helps and good luck with the new distro!