Bug 378041

My USB stick works, but mine is vfat (not ntfs).

To be clear, removable/ntfs worked on F-7?  
Do you have the ntfs support installed (ntfs-3g)?

Yes, the device worked without any problem on F-7 two days ago. Ntfs-3g is
installed. The problem is definitly the "mount as user" option that is set by
default. When deselecting this option it works like a charm (also via KDE).

However, I managed to format the disk to vfat also and I cannot confirm there a
problem either. Looks like it is really related to ntfs. I will try to confirm
this problem with different devices tomorrow at university.

Okay. The problem seems clearly to be with ntfs on removable devices. vfat usb
sticks seems to work without a problem.

The root of this problems seems that ntfs cannot be mount as user, but vfat can.
I am not sure for the reasons and also read that some people reports that they
cannot reproduce it under gnome. I am not 100% sure, but under F-7 I think a
NTFS device wasn't mounted as user. Any possibility to teach kde to mount all
file systems excluding ntfs as user?

This problem seems to be introduced by hal-0.5.10.
I've search around the web and found problems on several distros with this, 
eg:
Arch Linux: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=297389
Sidux (Debian Sid) (german): http://sidux.com/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t-6590.html

So I've forced a downgrade to hal-0.5.9 from F7. With this version the 
mounting of external ntfs partitions is working normal.

But I'm not sure if this is an issue introduced by a change in hal or an 
incompability by kde for the newest hal version.

Reassigning -> hal

(In reply to comment #5)
> Reassigning -> hal

Why? This stuff works fine with gnome-mount. In the future please don't reassign
bugs without justifying.

Sorry, seemed like a regression on the surface, hal-0.5.9 works here, hal-0.5.10
does not. ??

Is this possibly related to bug #373061 ?

(In reply to comment #8)
> Is this possibly related to bug #373061 ?

Sounds like the the same behavior. 

I have no ability to understand the code lines here, but I've grepped the source
of hal-0.5.10 for this message and it seems to come from hal-storage-mount.c:

        if (pol_is_fixed) {
                if (pol_change_uid) {
                        action = NULL; /*
"hal-storage-mount-fixed-extra-options"; TODO: rethink */
                } else {
                        action = "org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-fixed";
                }
        } else {
                if (pol_change_uid) {
                        action = NULL; /*
"hal-storage-mount-removable-extra-options"; TODO: rethink "extra-options" */
                } else {
                        action = "org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable";
                }
        }
        if (action == NULL) {
                unknown_error ("TODO: have to rethink extra options");
        }

David, comment?

Comment #9 shows that this is clearly a HAL regression (which GNOME happens not 
to trigger because it doesn't use the pol_change_uid feature), the error 
message comes from HAL and as per comment #7 it used to work.

*** Bug 373061 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

any progress here?

Any news on the current state? This problem is really a showstopper for
non-technical users and it actually looks like the display messaged is caused by
the code of HAL that was posted in #9.

I agree, we really need a solution for this problem, well, yesterday.

Ubuntu seems to have patched kdebase to fix this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/178351

Would this be doable also with our packages? Or is it fixed in the wrong 
package (kdebase and not hal)?

Looks like that might work, let's apply it then.
I still think HAL shouldn't be erroring out with a TODO message, but the 
kdebase fix should make it work.

We'll have to look at KDE 4 too, a port of that patch might be needed there.

Here's the patch Kubuntu is using, which also contains a workaround for bug 
428212:
http://patches.ubuntu.com/k/kdebase/extracted/kubuntu_9915_userdiskmount.diff

Looking at the HAL code, the Kubuntu patch is incomplete: "uid=" is banned for 
all file systems except vfat, iso9660, hfs and udf, not just for ntfs. The 
reason is that those file systems can carry native uids, so overriding the uid 
has security implications and the policy checks for that simply aren't 
implemented, so HAL just thrown an unhelpful "unknown error". IMHO this really 
ought to be fixed long term in HAL, but we have to patch KDE for now.

I've rolled a KDE 4 version of this workaround into the patch for bug 428212.

kdebase-3.5.9-7.fc8, which should fix this issue, has been pushed to the Fedora 
8 testing repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in 
this bug report.

If you want to test the update, you can install it with 
su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update kdebase'.  You can provide 
feedback for this update here: 
http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F8/FEDORA-2008-2797

Has anybody tested this update yet?

Confirmed fixed, pushing to stable.

kdebase-3.5.9-7.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.