Automounting Cameras and USB drives.

[MikeTbob]

My Camera and a few USB drives would not automount but I could manually mount them with no problem. The devices would show up on the Device Notifier but when I clicked on "Open with File Manager" it just opened my home directory. So after a little digging and lots of Googling, I found this link:PolicyKit - CBLFS
At the bottom, in the configuration section:

To allow HAL to automount removable drives such a thumbdrives, edit /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf and add the following between the <config></config> tags:

<match action="org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable">
    <return result="yes" />
</match>

Without this you will receive an error similar to org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.PermissionDeniedByPolic y: org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable no <--(action,result) when you "plug in" your thumb drive.

You then must upgrade your util-linux to the latest version or HAL automounting will fail with the following error FAT: Unrecognized mount option "uhelper=hal" or missing value.

EDIT: After rebooting, all external drives now automount.

[Mudgen]

It may be worth noting that HAL was removed from Ubuntu as of 10.04.

[MikeTbob]

Wow, I'm behind the times. What are they (Ubuntu) using for automount now?

[unlimitedscolobb]

What are they (Ubuntu) using for automount now?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_(software):

As of 2009, distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora, and projects such as GNOME and X.org are in the process of deprecating HAL as it has "become a large monolithic unmaintainable mess". It is in the process of being merged into udev (main udev, libudev, and udev-extras) and existing udev and kernel functionality. Ubuntu version 10.04 removes HAL from the boot process.

Initially a new daemon DeviceKit was planned to replace certain aspects of HAL, but in March 2009, DeviceKit was deprecated in favor of adding the same code to udev as a package: udev-extras, and some functions have now moved to udev proper.

[MikeTbob]

"become a large monolithic unmaintainable mess".

Enought said, I agree wholeheartedly. Thanks for the update.