Thoughts about HAL, Ivman and Pmount.

[Jonatan Liljedahl]

On Fri, 28 Oct 2005 09:56:16 -0400
Martin Pitt <martin at piware.de> wrote:

> > Unless pmount is called by ivman running as root, then it will be
> > mounted as ivman.plugdev with uid and gid mount options set
> > accordingly, and with umask 0002. And with my patch for pmount it
> > allows any user in"plugdev" group to unmount the device. (Yes I
> > know, not an ideal solution but it works for a small family LAN with
> > one box and n X-terminals).
> 
> You are welcome to use the patch for your own purposes. There is "add
> support for changing the group" on pmount's TODO list, so that you can
> tell pmount to assign any group your user is in to the mount point.
> 
> > Not very nice, you're right. So probably it would be better still to
> > don't automount anything at all, but only create the mountpoints and
> > then let the users mount/unmount it and the first user who mounts it
> > will own it.
> 
> Maybe this is a little better, but not the thing we would want to do
> in Ubuntu.

How are you doing it in Ubuntu?

> But since this is just a matter of setting the prefered
> default gconf schema values, it is easy for distros to customize the
> default behaviour.

My thoughts are about my own system which runs GoboLinux and Rox
desktop. GoboLinux has very little work regarding HAL and volume
managers, there exists recipes for hal, pmount and ivman and it's mostly
I who are trying these out and trying to figure out a nice default setup
which could be used on the next release of GoboLinux.
 
> > > I see two options to mitigate this:
> > > 
> > >   - In Ubuntu, gnome-volume-manager has a patch that adds support
> > >   for
> > >     multiseat, like found in the HP441. So by configuring
> > >     /etc/multiseat.conf properly, you can solve the conflict if
> > >     you have more than one head on your box.
> > 
> > In which way is it solved? Never heard of the HP441...
> 
> In this file you can configure the "heads", i. e. define which
> keyboards, monitors, and USB ports belong to a terminal.

That sounds very nice. So a device is owned by the user who's logged
into the corresponding head?

> > What do you mean "active" ? Can't two users be active at the same
> > time? For example, when I'm sitting here (logged in to X trough xdm)
> > and my girlfriend has logged in also, trough another box in this
> > room acting as an X terminal?
> 
> In this case both of you are really active at the same time. I meant
> that if multiple user are logged in at the same time on a single head,
> then only one desktop is actually displayed, and the other one sits
> around in the background. (cf. gdmflexiserver).

Ok, I see.

/Jonatan    -=( http://kymatica.com )=-