From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060210 Fedora/1.5.0.1-3 Firefox/1.5.0.1 Description of problem: If a USB device is attached at boot time, it is given different ownership according to file system type. In particular if a vfat device is attached, then ownership is given to the console user. On the other hand, if the device is formatted with ext3 then root owns the device after boot up. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): hal-0.5.7-0.cvs20060213.1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Attatch a vfat formated USB device and a ext3 formatted USB device 2. Reboot 3. Login in as a normal user Actual Results: The vfat device is owned by the user and can be unmounted by the user while the ext3 device is woned by root and cannot be controlled by the user. Expected Results: Both devices are owned by the console user. Additional info: My opinion would be that the system should not mount any device at boot time unless the device is defined in /etc/fstab. Removable devices should be optionally mounted by the desktop environmnet when a user logs in. This seems like a security concern.
ext2/3 follows *nix ownership conventions. There is no way to force a specific owner for the device. As for who can mount/unmount it, that would indeed be something that hal can handle.