So recently, some talks and readings with some of my friends and Planet Gentoo, and I decided to check out some hotplugging and automounting.

For automounting, I’d heard of the Gnome Volume Manager in Ubuntu. I didn’t think that there was one of those in Gentoo. I’d heard of something called supermount, but I never really looked into it. When I did, it turned out to be a kernel thing. I really didn’t want to recompile my kernel so soon after I did a few weeks ago. At the bottom of the page, it pointed to submount, a userland alternative for supermount. I emerged it and it worked fabulously.

For hotplugging, I saw that I already had hotplug installed. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to activate it. Some digging later, I stumbled upon an article on udev. Now udev is an interesting concept. In this day and age with USB, we can be swapping devices back and forth. Now with the old /dev filesystem, how could you tell what was lp0 and lp1? You can’t. Along comes udev, which somehow had a unique node for each device, so that they can’t be confused simply because they got plugged in in the wrong order.

udev is currently installed on my system, but I have yet to use it as there was a problem with X finding the right pointer driver. I will try again tomorrow and see how udev turns out.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 17th, 2005 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.