I installed Debian 6.0 (squeeze) a few days ago on my machine. I installed the default GNOME desktop, standard settings. Unfortunately, I just noticed that when I plug in USB storage devices (external hard drivers, USB sticks, etc.), they don't get automatically mounted, like they used to (and presumably still should).
I noticed that the usb-storage module wasn't loaded automatically, either, so no device nodes were getting created either. So, I loaded that module, so at least now the device nodes get created automatically, it's just a case of mounting them manually. But that's not the point!
In nautilus's preferences, I have "Browse media when inserted" checked, (i.e., the default), but just nothing in the UI happens when I insert something. The device never appears in the Computer view.
Watching the kernel logs shows that the insertions are definitely being registered, and after manually loading usb-storage first (what is that about? Why isn't that happening automatically?), device nodes get created, but that's it.
So. My question is, from here, how do I go about finding out what's wrong?
Best Answer
I've fixed this now.
Firstly, I didn't install squeeze with the default GNOME desktop environment. I mis-remembered. What I did was install the base system, and then install the gnome-desktop-environment package, aiming for a lighter/closer-to-upstream set of packages.
Now, completely unscientifically, I did two things in one go to fix this, so I don't know for sure which did it. I decided to install Debian's GNOME desktop task (
tasksel install gnome-desktop --new-install). I thought that maybe, somehow, gnome-desktop-environment didn't pull in the right packages to enable this functionality. In retrospect, I think that's unlikely.Next, I restarted the machine. I was sure I had restarted the machine after installing gnome-desktop-environment, but now I think I hadn't. So presumably, some services weren't working properly, or something like that.
After restarting, things worked exactly as I wanted - USB storage devices were being mounted automatically, at /media/, which is great.