Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 09:17:55PM +0000, Christof Lange wrote:
> 
> Thank you for your answer, James. This seems to indicate that Linux 
> today is something very different from what BL is about. What is udev 
> and devfs? At which version of Slackware have these been introduced. 
> Do Linux users in our days still have to mount devices? 

I'm far from being any kind of expert on this. My observations are based on 
the bits that I 
(think I) understand from tech news pieces I've read. It looks like devfs was 
under 
development for the 2.4.x kernel series and that, because of problems, it was 
dropped in 
favor of udev during the 2.6.x kernel series. Briefly stated, these are both 
"special-purpose file systems present on many Unix-like operating systems, 
used for 
presenting device files, an abstraction for accessing I/O and other 
peripherals" (from 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devfs ). The wikipedia entry for udev gives some 
further 
information--see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udev . I'm not sure when udev 
started being 
used in Slackware--maybe within the last year or so. I'm actually not even 
sure Slackware 
_is_ using it: I read an article recently about someone who had installed the 
latest Slack 
and, according to their claim, it still ships with a 2.4.x kernel (though you 
can of course 
upgrade to 2.6.x). That makes me wonder if Patrick might not be dragging on 
implementing 
udev as well. But the truth of the matter is that I just don't know for sure. 
Debian 
unstable switched over to udev about a year or two ago.

USB devices are auto-mounted on the latest-greatest distros, but that seems 
to be largely a 
function of the integrated desktop environment. Gnome and KDE (probably Xfce 
as well) make 
an icon representing the device appear on the desktop when a USB device is 
inserted. You do 
have to manually unmount the device, which is typically accomplished by 
right-clicking on 
the device and selecting "unmount" from the resulting drop-down menu. For 
leaner desktop 
environments easy ways of mounting/unmounting dynamic drives are provided. A 
nice little 
desktop applet called mount.app is available for Windowmaker and also works 
in Fluxbox and 
other WM's. With that, it is simple a matter of clicking it a few times to 
cycle through 
available devices (floppy, CD, USB stick), then clicking on a "mount" button. 
I'm not sure 
how mount.app interacts with udev though, and whether it can dynamically 
add/detect nodes 
and mount points. I'm mostly using Gnome these days on my more bloated, 
bleeding-edge Debian 
or Ubuntu systems. But I think mount.app would be a nice addition to BL for 
those better 
disposed toward the use of rodents.

James