iPod, udev, and mounting

[Michael A. Peters]

Howdy list -
I got an iPod mini for Christmas. Works well in Windows. I am hoping to  
be able to use it in Linux, I rarely boot Windows. Specifically with  
Fedora Core, with something like gtkpod.

gtkpod compiles, but I haven't tried _using_ it yet.
I want to do things right and potentially offer it back to community as  
an rpm package when things are working right (assuming they do ;)

For mounting the device - that works (at least with FireWire) through  
udev - after creating a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/60-ipod.rules  
containing:

BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="iPod            ", KERNEL="sd?2", NAME="%k",  
SYMLINK="ipod"

/dev/ipod is created upon attaching to firewire cable.
Will mount via mount /dev/ipod /mnt/point

The gtkpod documentation says to use autofs - which is part of Fedora,  
but nothing else (IE digital cameras etc.) seem to be configured to use  
autofs ( at least not via /etc/auto.master ) so I was wondering what  
the "Fedora" way to handle hot pluggable fat32 devices that should be  
mountable/writable by non root (console) users is. I'm guessing that  
the device node needs pam to give it console user permission, but you  
don't know ahead of time what device node it will be - so should that  
actually be done with udev?

What is the best way to only have the volume actually mount when the  
device is needed? I've actually tried with the autofs method mentioned  
in the gtkpod README but that doesn't seem to work in Fedora C3, I'm  
not sure why - I'll have to double check everything (device does  
manually mount).

It's only an iPod mini, so if I end up having to restore the iPod  
because stuff gets messed up - no big loss, it doesn't take long to  
fill it again ... ;)

-- 
Cheap Linux CD's
http://mpeters.us/linux/