Description of problem: Since upgrading to kdebase-3.5.2-0.3.fc5, my two external USB drives no longer get mounted automatically when I login to a KDE session. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 3.5.2-0.3.fc5 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. upgrade to kdebase-3.5.2-0.3.fc5 2. reboot system with external USB drives attached. 3. log in, using a KDE session Actual results: raw devices /dev/sd[whatever] & partitions /dev/sd[whatever][n] get created, but no mount points appear in /media and devices don't get mounted. Expected results: devices /dev/sd[whatever] & /dev/sd[whatever][n] get created, mount points [their-disklable]s appear in /media and devices gets mounted there. Additional info: This used to work acceptabley well, pre-upgrade. Now dmesg shows the kernel scanning the USB bus and udev creates the nodes in /dev/, but that's it. Moreover, I can't figure out a work-around to mount the disks at some persistent location automatically. In order to mount the disks, I have to pore over dmesg to figure out which disk is which, and then create mount points outside of /media and mount them by hand. If I create mount points in /media (the desired location, see below) by hand, then KDE somehow wakes up and creates new mount points /media/[disklable]-1 beside the hand created /media/disklable]s and mount gets confused. Since the disks are used for backing up the several linux/*BSD/widows/OSX machines on my network and all the various backup scripts/software rely on knowing that the appropriate disc is mounted at /media/backup[x] acording to the OS type, my backups break. Logging in with a [extremely distasteful, intelligence-insulting] gnome session does create the mount points and mount the devices as expected. Of course what would be *ideal* is if attached USB disks would get mounted at boot time, without anyone having to log in to the console. This was possible with FC4, but gnome-volume-manager "improved" it out of existence. Unfortunately, I am not clever enough to glean from the udev documentation how to write rules to do this. The complication is that I have multiple USB disks attached, and as I understand it, which physical device gets assigned which device name by the kernel is non-deterministic.
Could you please try new kdebase-3.5.2-0.4.fc5 from FC5-update? and probably try with new user. It looks strange to me because i cannot reproduce this problem with kdebase-3.5.2-0.3.fc5 on several test machines here.
I see the same behavior with kdebase-3.5.2-0.4.fc5, and my usual user account. I have a long compile going now, and will check with a new account when I get a chance.
Could you please check if "KDED Media Manager Service" is running on your machine? You find it in kcontrol->KDE Componetns->Service Manager Please make sure that you have to unplug the USB drives before changing this. Are you sure that this problem does not appear with kdebase-3.5.2-0.2.fc5?
OK, I did some experimenting and figured it out. Before I explain, let me respond to comment #3 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=190748#c3: Yes, "KDED Media Manager Service" is running and yes, I'm sure that it did not appear with kdebase-3.5.2-0.2.fc5. Unlike the prior behavior of KDE and the current behavior of Gnome, USB drives that are attached at boot time do not have an entry created in /media at login time. Furthermore, unlike the prior behavior of KDE, USB drives that are attached at boot time don't get mounted automatically at login time. Nor do they pop up a window asking the user what they want to do, unlike the case when a USB drive is attached post login. My KDE desktop is set not to display icons, since I'm a dinosaur who's been using Unix everday since the mid-70's who agrees with Ken Thompson when he said "Graphical User Interfaces make easy things trivial and difficult things impossible." Therefore, I initially missed the unmounted removable disk icons which would have provided a clue, and by the time I thought to turn those icons on, I had already created /media/[disklable] mount points by hand, so the desktop icons KDE produced were labled [disklable]-1, and as I remarked above, clicking them confused mount. When I have unmounted removable drive icons turned on in my KDE desktop, I do indeed see the unmounted (by new, post-3.5.2-0.2.fc5 default) USB discs that were attached at boot time. While, unlike the case of freshly attached USB discs, I don't get a dialog asking me if I want to open them in a new window, thereby mounting them, I can at least click them to mount. Needless to say, the change to requiring unprompted graphical user interaction to mount USB discs that are present at boot time is unacceptable in my use case - using USB discs for automatic network backups. Fortunately, a couple of hours of renewed poring over the udev docs and a tedious modify udev rules/fstab, reboot, repeat cycle did finally uncover a method to have my backup discs mounted not-quite-at* boot-time. So, the bottom line is the bug is either a user headspace error or a fresh KDE/gnome-volume-manager mis-feature, depending on your point of view. If you agree with me that it is the latter, the bug can be changed to an RFE to address my use case by restoring the pre-kdebase-3.5.2-0.3.fc5 (or even pre-FC5) behavior. Otherwise you can just close it. (*) For some reason, the system hasn't finished probing my USB buses so my udev rule hasn't been invoked and the corresponding devices that I mount in fstab don't exist by the time in the init sequence that filesystems are getting mount, so I get an error from rc.sysinit. However, the mount default is to retry the mounts, so they have been mounted by the time I can check for the discs being mounted.