Automounting of USB drives - Why is it a problem?

[Manolis Kiagias]

Odhiambo Washington wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> For some time now, I have been baffled by one thing: Mac OS X somehow has
> FreeBSD under the hood. When you connect a USB stick (flash disk, external
> drive) to a Mac, it gets automounted, yet the same does not happen on
> FreeBSD.
> I have seen several questions being asked on this list about this feature,
> but the answer is neither here nor there.
> There is even a port (sysutils/automounter) that I believe is supposed to
> help towards this, but again it's not as easy as it seems to be.
> Now my question is just one: Why should it be this difficult for FreeBSD to
> have the automount feature within the base system?
> If OS X is doing it, Linux is doing it, FreeBSD can do it.
>
>   
FreeBSD *can* automount. The problem for the time being is pulling a USB
flash drive without unmounting.
To automount (assuming you are using something like GNOME or XFCE), you
can use the facilities provided by hal and policykit.

See this:

http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/halfaq.html#q3

(I have also written a complete set of steps for this - currently in
Greek only, but I will translate it sooner or later)