[kde-linux] Auto-mounting removable drives - dbus / hal problems?

[Boyan Tabakov]

On Friday 09 February 2007 00:21:56 Bogus Zaba wrote:
> I have got used to the nice auto-mounting of removable media provided by
> my Suse 10.1 / KDE 3.5.1 combination. For some reason this has now
> stopped working. There are two symptoms. When I first open a KDE session
> I get the message that dbus is not running and am invited to start it by
> typing /etc/init.d/dbus start. I do as I'm told and type this into a
> console.
>
> But when I put in a usb drive or a DVD I get no automatic message
> telling me that a device has been detected and asking me whether I want
> to open a konqi filemanager window / play a DVD or whatever. When I look
> at devices shown by the media:/ protocol , clicking on any of them
> yields the message : "Feature only available with HAL". If I look to see
> the haldaemon status, it is usually "unused", but if I start it, that
> also makes no difference.
>
> I can manually mount these devices at any place in the tree I want (eg
> /media/someplace) but then run into permission frustrations as I only
> seem to be able to do the mounting as root and only root can then write
> to the drive.
>
> Any ideas on how I can get the simple user's auto-mounting working again?

Hi,

The problem is explained in one of my posts in the SuSE KDE mailing list. Here 
is the quote:

On 27.1.2007 00:37:54 Boyan Tabakov wrote:
> Hi,
> Unfortunately my today's update to KDE 3.5.6 got me surprised with
> something: d-bus daemon fails to start due to segmentation fault. Nothing
> appears in the /var/log/messages log.
>
> First I noticed that my unmounted optical drives icons appeared on the
> desktop, which they previously did, only when a medium is inserted. Then I
> got some messages about HAL being needed to mount those. So why wasn't hal
> running - answer - dbus could not start.
>
> I wish, I saved my update log... Anyway, I am pretty sure that the update
> was only on the normal kde stuff - all the kde* packages, qt, arts and some
> other that usually get updated upon new KDE release.
>
> Reinstalling dbus-1 or the kde 3.5.6 packages showed no results.
>
> Any ideas?

After some debugging the problem revealed itself.

This was caused by this bug in dbus-userdb.c sourse file:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2006-February/004278.html

An infinite recursion is caused by having some group name in the config files 
that does not actually exists on the system. In my case this seemed to 
be 'netdev', mentioned in avahi-dbus.conf. This file has been created two 
days ago, during my previous update.

The quick workaround is to create a dummy group 'netdev'.

Maybe SuSE should release a patched version of dbus?

-- 
Blade hails you...

Forever shall the wolf in me desire the sheep in you
                                         --Nightwish
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-linux/attachments/20070209/11aa150b/attachment.sig>