On Thu, 2007-06-07 at 09:34 +0100, Steve Hill wrote: > It certainly is to do with compatibility - up until recently (the > last > couple of years) it was certainly unusual to have the media mounted when > you weren't actually using it so it was expected that the media wouldn't > be mounted if you were trying to erase it, for example. Let's see. From FC3 through today automounting of storage devices was handled by g-v-m and HAL. Prior to FC3 there was magicdev which only handled optical discs: Magicdev is a daemon that runs within the GNOME environment and detects when a CD is removed or inserted. Magicdev handles running autorun programs on the CD, updating the File Manager, and playing audio CDs. Looking at the earliest version of magicdev I find a build date of Wed 22 Sep 1999 04:21:52. That would probably land it (I didn't check) in RHL 6.1 (codename Cartman) that was released October 4, 1999. So we've been automounting optical discs since late 1999. That's almost 8 years by now. Other distributions of Linux have a similar history. David -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list