For KDE to use any device, removable or not, the device must
first be mounted. When a device is mounted, KDE gets all the needed
information about the device: how to read it, how to write information to
it, and much more.
The use of a device is controlled by the operating
system and it is important your operating system has tools for managing
these devices. KDE can also auto mount devices, working with
HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). Your distribution
should have set up HAL automatically; if not,
consult the documentation provided by your distribution.
There are several ways to find the list of media devices: use
whichever one suits you best:
-
Enter
media:/
or
system:/media
into the Konqueror location bar.
-
Navigate to it by clicking on the
Services
tab in Konqueror's Navigation Panel, then selecting
Storage
Media
.
-
Select
->
from the Konqueror menus.
-
Click the
System
desktop icon, then from
the window that appears, click on
Storage
Media
.
The
Storage Media
location (also known as
the media:/ protocol) will show all devices which are recognized by
KDE, including the hard drive and CD and DVD
drives, as well as USB and Firewire devices,
provided that your distribution is set up correctly to tell KDE
about them.
You can also setup KDE to display a device icon
on the desktop. To start or configure this feature in the
KDE Control Center go
to
Desktop
+
Behavior
and select the
Device Icons
Tab. The device icon action
can be used to show both mounted and unmounted devices, or to only create an
icon when media is detected and automounted (only if automount is properly
configured), by not checking the unmounted boxes.
With KDE 3.5 and newer, devices can be automounted, meaning one only
has to insert the removable disk. KDE will then open an automount prompt
asking the user “What do you want to do?” with the media. To
configure the list of options prompted for devices open the
KDE Control Center and
navigate to
Peripherals
+
Storage
Media
Here you can add and remove programs from the
list of devices.
The automount feature will only work if
dbus, hal and
udev are installed and the kernel is properly
configured. To find out if they are running on your system check the
Process Table
in KSysguard for:
hald
,
dbus-deamon
, and
udevd
. KDE does not provide any of these
components. You must check with you distribution.
If your system does not automount KDE is configured to mount and
unmount devices which the current user have permission to mount. If a device
is mounted as the root partition (i.e. /), and you login
to KDE as a user, KDE can not mount or unmount it without being given a
higher permission. To check a devices mount permission see the
/etc/fstab file.
To mount and unmount devices manually in KDE one only has to right mouse button
click the device icon in media:/ or on the desktop and select
or
, for
removable devices one can also unmount with
. KDE still requires the device to be setup in
/etc/fstab.
