I'm having problems with mediamanager on KDE 3.5 (3.5.8 and 3.5.10).
The actual problem is that I'm not getting a pop-up asking me what to do on CD/DVD change or plugging in a USB flash drive.
Maybe someone can explain me what's going on...

When I call
$ dcop kded mediamanager fullList

I initally get:
/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_2e648e91_f15c_4b78_8680_37dea36b783e
sda2
498G-Medium

true
/dev/sda2
/
ext3
true

media/hdd_mounted

---

And that's exactly what konqueror or dolphin are expecting when accessing system:/media.
But after a while, the command above returns:
/org/kde/mediamanager/fstab/devsda2
sda2
Festplatte (sda2)

true
/dev/sda2
/
ext3
true

media/hdd_mounted

---

Looking at the source code of mediamanager, the first output is being produced by hal backend, and the other by fstab backend.

If I send the command to reload backends:
$ dcop kded mediamanager reloadBackends

everything works fine again (for a while).

mediamanager is set to load on demand and use the hal backend.

Any ideas? Is dbus disconnecting the hal backend? If so, why? I can't figure that out...
I have this problem on 100+ PCs, Kubuntu 7.10 (KDE 3.5. and 8.04 (KDE 3.5.10).

Toni[hr]
One more thing...
While getting the second reply, navigating to system:/media in konqueror or dolphin and clicking the CD produces an error message like (translated) "only available with HAL".

Your issue appears to be that HAL is either not installed or active on your system. Please contact your distribution to help enable it.

bcooksley wrote:Your issue appears to be that HAL is either not installed or active on your system. Please contact your distribution to help enable it.

HAL is installed and working properly.

It is possible that your system is still in the process of starting up ( therefore HAL hasn't started ) when you login to KDE. You will need to ensure that HAL is started before the graphical login interface ( [X/G/K]DM )

bcooksley wrote:It is possible that your system is still in the process of starting up ( therefore HAL hasn't started ) when you login to KDE. You will need to ensure that HAL is started before the graphical login interface ( [X/G/K]DM )

That could have been the problem for some users since Kubuntu starts HAL after kdm.

As I stated in my first post, mediamanager initially shows HAL devices. That implies that HAL is up&running at that point. After a while, mediamanager falls back to the fstab backend without an apparent reason.

Just to be sure, I've already changed the starting point of kdm to as late as possible (S24hal, S33kdm). That didn't change the described behaviour.

It could be possible that the DBus permissions to not allow the media:/ KIO slave to communicate with HAL correctly, so when it requests some information it fails and triggers the fall back.

As I wrote in my first post, everything is working fine initially, but breaks after a while (could be minutes or hours). And after I send:
"dcop kded mediamanager reloadBackends"
everything is working fine again.
So it can't be a permission problem.

You could try removing the FStab backend, or having that DCop command being run every 5 minutes or so automatically.

Thank you for your ideas, I've had the same idea a couple of months ago.

I've written a script that su-s to the current user, sets DISPLAY to :0, checks the output of
"dcop kded mediamanager fullList"
every minute and reloads backends when needed.
That script runs every minute and mails me when a reload is needed. So the situation is, let's say, under control.

The thing is that we have about 500 PCs and laptops running Kubuntu 8.04 LTS, and I can't install that script on every PC.

Why do you think that removing the fstab backend would change anything? From what I've seen in the source code, media manager only fails to fstab when there's a problem with the HAL backend. So if I remove the fstab backend, instead of getting the fstab output, I would get an error. No change at all from my point of view...

When the HAL backend is returning the list, does clicking on a CD work?

Yes, it works as expected when the HAL backend returns the list of devices.

If there are any updates available, I would recommend installing them. Also, you may wish to ensure that you have an undamaged system installation.

Unfortunately KDE 3 is not likely to have any more bugfix releases, and Kubuntu will not be releasing any further KDE 3 versions so if this is an actual bug it is not likely to ever be fixed at this point. I however have never encountered a problem like this before, so it is quite possible that SUSE may have a custom patch that fixes the issue, or a workaround ( such as removing the FStab backend )

You may also wish to ensure that the configuration files for the backend are themselves not damaged, and have the correct backend stated in them. KDE configuration files are located at ~/.kde/share/config/

I should have noted that I'm an experienced admin and programmer.

All system components are up2date, and since I've had that problem on a fresh installation as well, there can be no problems with config files either.

I know it's very unlikely this KDE3 bug will ever be fixed, and since I can't reproduce it on my desktop, I can't fix it either. But I'll look into SuSE's changes to mediamanager (if any), thanks for that idea. We've actually migrated from SuSE to Kubuntu 2 years ago.