The hotplug subsystem

The /dev directory under Frugalware is a ramdisk. Every device node is created automatically during the system boot by the hotplug subsystem, more specifically, by udev. It means there won’t be unnecessary device nodes in /dev, but it also means that if you create a device node manually, it will exist only until the next shutdown/reboot.

If you want to force Frugalware to create a device node "manually" during each boot, you must create a device file under /lib/udev/devices: it will be copied on each boot automatically.

The udev needs sysfs, so it will only work with the 2.6.x kernel series. Do not try to run udev on Frugalware with kernel series 2.4.x.

Pendrives (also known as thumbdrives, or USB keys) are well-supported through the hotplug scripts and udev. If you insert a pendrive into the USB slot, udev will create a device node for it in /dev. Most pendrives contain only one partition and their filesystem is vfat. In most cases, the pendrive will behave like a SCSI disc. It means, you can find the pendrive under /dev/sda and its first partition under /dev/sda1. Adding the following line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1 /media/pendrive auto defaults,noauto,user 0 0

will allow users to mount their pendrive if the device node exists (if the device is inserted into the slot).

If you use KDE, Gnome or XFCE4 they will handle automatic mounting of such devices. You should not edit /etc/fstab as automounting will not work for you. For blackbox, fluxbox, englightenment, e17 and other smaller window manager users there is ivman for automounting, but it may not work as well as in KDE, Gnome, XFCE4. See also the automounting part of the documentation.

Typically, there are two types of digital cameras. Some of them support both access methods, others use only one of them. First, most of the cameras can be treated as a pendrive (USB Mass Storage device), you can mount them and copy the pictures from them easily.

Other cameras support the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP). You can grab the pictures from them (and do lots of other actions) with gphoto2, if your model is supported. (If it’s not available on your system, a simple su -c \'pacman-g2 -S gphoto2\' will install it onto your system.)

D-BUS is a simple IPC (inter-process communication) library based on messages. HAL is a hardware abstraction layer which uses D-BUS. Ivman is based on HAL and uses pmount ("policy mount"), which is a wrapper around the standard mount program which permits normal users to mount removable devices without an existing /etc/fstab entry.

Ivman is a daemon to automount CD-ROMs and DVDs when inserted in a drive, or play audio CDs or video DVDs automatically. It is 100% userspace, so it is a safe replacement for submount.

If you want to change the default settings, all config files are located in /etc/ivman. They are plain XML files, just read them, everything is quite self-explanatory.

Automounting also happens with KDE and Gnome, but their respective VFS implementation does that, not ivman. Ivman is useful for other windowing systems where is no support for such a feature.