[kde-linux] Mechanism that mounts USB flashdrives

[Douglas Phillipson]

I have been having some trouble mounting flash drives under KDE on some 
computers.  My desktop boxes nicely pop up a "USB Stick" Icon when I 
insert a USB memory stick, but my HP Pavilion laptop doesn't.  They both 
have:

Fedora Core 4 with latest updates.
2.6.17 Kernel
KDE 3.5.3

The USB stick does get recognized by the kernel according to 
/var/log/messages and I can manually mount it but no USB Stick Icon 
appears on the desktop as it does on my Desktop machines.

I would like to understand the mechanism that does this whole thing.  I 
presume its a HAL function that passes the information to some KDE 
daemon but I'm not sure. Where are the config files that define where 
the mount point is located, where the file for the Icon is located, etc. 
  From start to finish I would like to understand the whole process if 
anyone is patient enough to clue me in or point me to a FAQ somewhere 
that explains how it all works under KDE.

Thank you very much

Doug Phillipson