Apologies if this isn't the right place to ask.

I'm trying to get DeviceNotifier to react to the insertion of an ExpressCard CompactFlash reader (pciehp driver).

This is on Debian Squeeze, therefore KDE 4.4.x

The reader is only visible when also showing non-removable drives. Attempting to mount from there fails, due to privilege issues - which I believe also mean that the device isn't seen as a removable one.

Ideas?

Thanks

The decision on if a device is removable or not will probably be taken by UDev rather than KDE.
KDE 4.4 means you are using HAL, so you may need to check with it as well.

What form of an error message do you get?

The card reader device itself shouldn't be detected by the Device Notifier, as it should only show mountable media.

Once media ( in this case a Compact Flash card ) are inserted into the reader, they should show up as normal.

Thanks for your reply.

If you have hints about HAL and/or UDev (if this isn't the right forum), I'd appreciate. This far, I haven't found anything about how a linux system determines whether a device is removable or not.

When listing non-removable devices and asking DeviceNotifier to mount (by clicking on the USB plug icon), the error message is "cannot mount the disk". A spinning wheel remains in the USB plug icon location until the card reader is ejected.

I should have stated that I always insert the card in the reader first, and the reader in the PC after. Same for eject, remove reader from PC first.

Since posting, I had a look in "source" (Debian code might differ slightly) at http://websvn.kde.org/tags/KDE/4.4.5/kd ... iew=markup around line 170. Apparently, the notifier drive list come from two sources, hotplug (which I believe is deprecated???) and SolidDevice (which I never heard about). I get lost easily in framework code, so I didn't look further.

In this case, the list of drives comes from HAL. If you connect the reader to the computer first, then insert the card, does anything change?

No change, but you were right on, this is an HAL issue.

Solution was to add an FDI file to tell HAL that CF Cards are indeed removable. Full details at http://bugs.debian.org/635756

Thanks again,

Jean-Marc