Alan, Thank you for the explanation...some of this helps, I already knew about the mount command. I have hal and dbus installed...what GUI tools for those apps were you refering to?
douglas On 2/5/07, Alan McKinnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Monday 05 February 2007, Douglas Linford wrote: > Alan, > > > Excuse the double post.... You mean the top post? Please don't do that, on mailing lists it's considered rude > So...I am running Gnome 2.16.2 Is Gnome Volume Manager also > managing the drives and partitions I have? Yes > And then what creates the volume name that is displayed on the > desktop for that drive? Gnome VFS (Virtual File System) reads it from various possible places, like the file system label, or the disk drive description, or one of the USB attributes in the case of USB storage devices. What VFS us trying to do is find a sensible descriptor to display to you so you know what device it's talking about > In my example I have a USB external drive with a ext3 partition, > there is no listing in /etc/fstab for that partition, /etc/mtab lists > it as, /dev/sdc2 /media/disk, and on the desktop the icon for it > reads, 66.0 GB Volume. Where is that configured? It isn't configured anywhere to my knowledge, but I'm not a Gnome user and could be wrong. Let me explain how this works: The kernel knows about mount points and file systems. Somewhere it has a function that performs a mount, and user space programs use this function to accomplish the mount. One such program is "mount", which is configured via /etc/fstab and mtab as you point out. "mount" is a traditional program, been around for ages and we all know and love it. It's even suid so regular users can use it if root puts "user" or "users" in the options for a particular mount. "mount" is not the only way to mount stuff though. You can write any user space program you want, and call it whatever you feel like, to perform this system function called mounting. And you don't *have* to consider /etc/fstab when doing it either. Now, "mount" worked fine for years, but it all went belly up when pluggable storage devices came out. A user expects to insert a flash disk or camera and to see the files on it, and to not have to be root to do this. This effectively makes mount unsuitable for pluggable devices. So KDE and Gnome have figured out other ways to mount stuff, and lately the workable solutions have used hal to find devices and dbus to tell apps about the device, all nicely configurable with GUI tools. They don't use fstab either. You can cause interesting effects for yourself if you use an app like supermount from Mandriva and also use KDE automounting. Supermount modifies fstab, so this combination can result in the same device being mounted twice at the same time - entirely possible but seldom what you want :-) I hope this helps, and that I correctly judged what you needed to know. Now it's up to you to find the cute box to click to get the behaviour you want. alan -- Optimists say the glass is half full, Pessimists say the glass is half empty, Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be? Alan McKinnon alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za +27 82, double three seven, one nine three five -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
