OpenEuphoria

Re: [OT] Linux versus floppy

• Posted by Derek Parnell <ddparnell at bigpond.com> Jun 10, 2003
• 403 views

On Mon, 9 Jun 2003 20:36:13 -0400, <jbrown105 at speedymail.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 11:20:44PM +0100, Pete Lomax wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 9 Jun 2003 14:59:31 -0400, irvm at ellijay.com wrote:
>>
>> I've put [OT] is the subject header where it belongs 
>>
>> >I don't exactly know what supermount is supposed to do, but I >can tell 
>> you that it doesn't work for me. on your system it may be automount or 
>> just auto ?
>>
>> Pete
>>
>
> Not sure what is meant by 'auto'.
>
> I believe supermount is a setuid program that enabled certain users to 
> mount/
> umount certain devices (such as /dev/cdrom or /dev/fd0). The idea was to 
> enable
> users to be able to mount cd-roms and such w/o needing to bother the 
> sysadmin.
> (This is obsoleted by the 'users' flag in fstab, which basicly allows
> plain mount/umount to do the same thing.)
>
> I've never used supermount, I use automount on a daily basis however.
>
> automount is in 2 parts: a daemon and a filesystem. The file system can 
> either
> be a kernel fs (in which case the type of the fs is 'automount(pid)' 
> where
> 'pid' is the pid of the daemon) or a modifed NFS server (in which case 
> the
> type of the fs is 'nfs'). Normally you'd use the kernel fs, but thats a 
> minor
> technical detail.
>
> What you do, is mount the automount fs on a directory, say '/misc' ... 
> then,
> when you try to access, say, '/misc/cdrom', the automount fs sends a 
> message to
> the daemon. The automount daemon (which runs as root) mounts the 
> preconfigured
> device onto /misc/cdrom. After a preconfigured amount of time has passed 
> with
> no accesses to /misc/cdrom, the automount daemon will unmount it. This is 
> all
> done transparently (and is not dependant on the user who first tries to 
> access
> '/misc/cdrom' having root permissions for the mount to occur).
>
> Of course, the above basicly has nothing to do with the original question
> being asked... if this were a Linux mailing list I'd ask for more details
> (such as if there was a kernel OOPS, if so to show a copy of it, what 
> happens
> when you try to write to the floppy in the linux console as opposed to in 
> the
> X session, what the output of 'cp /dev/fd0 /tmp/fd0;file /tmp/fd0' is,
> and what is your kernel version and what drivers do you have compiled in)
> but since this is for Euphoria, I'll just hold my breath. ;]
>

The discussion has not advanced the idea that Linux is simple to use. It 
makes Windows seem like a dream come true 

-- 

cheers,
Derek Parnell