Removable Disks<br>For KDE to read any disk, removable or not, the disk must first be mount. When a device is mount it can then be read, it gives KDE all the needed information about the device, how to read it, how to write information to it, and much more.
<br>Now that we have an understanding of what mounting is lets see how to mount a device. First know defining 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).
<br>The Easiest way to find the media device is enter the protocol media:/ or system:/media in to the konqueror location bar or navigate to it by:<br>1.clicking on the system tab in the meta bar, followed by selecting Storage Media.
<br>2.Go -> Media<br>3.clicking the system desktop icon, then Storage Media.<br>4.expanding the System menu on the KDE panel, and selecting Storage Media.<br>The media:/ protocol will show all device which are recognized by the KDE, including the hard drive and CD and DVD drives. If setup correctly USB and Firewire device will also be here.
<br>You can also setup KDE to deplay a devce icon on the desktop. To start or configure this feature in the control panel go to Desktop -> Behavior and select the Device Icon Tab. The device icon action can be used to show divices when mount and unmount, or to only create an icon when media is detected and automounted(only if automount is properly configured), by not checking the unmounted boxes.
<br><br>Automount<br><br>With KDE 3.5 and newer, devices can be automount, meaning one only has to insert the removation disk. KDE will 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:
<br>Conrol Panel -> Peripherals -> Storage Media Here you can add and remove programs from the list of devices.<br>The automount feature will only work if dbus, hal, udev are installed and the kernel is properly configured. To find out if they are running on your system cheek the Process Table in KDE System Gaurd for: hald, dbus-deamon, and udevd.
<br>KDE does not provide any of these components. You must cheek with you distrobution.<br><br>Mounting<br><br>If your system does not automount KDE is configure to mount and unmount deivce which the current user have permision to mount. If a divce is mount as root(ie the root partion), and you login to KDE as a user, KDE can not mount or umount it, without being given a higher permission. To cheek a devices mount premission see the /etc/fstab file.
<br>To mount and unmount devices manually in KDE one only has to right click the device icon in media:/ or on the desktop and select mount/unmount, for removable devices one can also unmount with remove device safty. KDE still requires the device to be setup in /etc/fstab.
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