Lanny Marcus wrote: > On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 8:46 PM, MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:19 PM, Philip Manuel <phil at zomojo.com> wrote: >> >>> I'm trying to understand why a normal user is not allowed to unmount >>> their USB stick? I think it is most likely a udev rule. does anyone know ? >>> > > >> If I understand this correctly, it's a mount/umount rule - normal >> users cannot run root commands. They are written to disallow normal >> users from performing root tasks. >> >> However, if you are using gnome, you can use the gnome-umount command >> (which is the equivalent of right-clicking the icon and selecting >> "Unmount"). I suspect there is a similar analogue in KDE. >> > > Good explanation Mark. I use GNOME and I have zero problems with this. Lanny > Mark's assumption was correct. In KDE, the right-click menu item is "Safely remove". I find it interesting, though, that root can manually mount a USB drive from the command line and any user can "safely remove" it via KDE. For example, I have this line in my fstab for a backup hard drive LABEL=OT3 /media/OT3 ext3 noauto,user,rw Normally, it's mounted and unmounted by the backup script but I discovered that if root manually mounts it [root at mavis ~]# mount /media/OT3 [root at mavis ~]# mount <snip> /dev/sda1 on /media/OT3 type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) [root at mavis ~]# And I try to unmount it as my normal user, I run into the behavior that is spelled out in the man page: [rj at mavis ~]$ umount /media/OT3 umount: only root can unmount LABEL=OT3 from /media/OT3 [rj at mavis ~]$ However, I CAN unmount it using KDE. --*USUALLY*-- Occasionally, the desktop icon will indicate "unmounted" but either attempting to mount the drive or manually examining /etc/mtab reveals that the drive is stll mounted. If one is to believe the mount man page, there is/are 1 or 2 bug(s) here. So, Mark, KDE has a true analogue only if GNOME is similarly broken.