== How to get automatic volume management on Fedora 14 without Gnome

One of the nice things about a modern Linux machine is that if you
plug in a USB key or stick a CD-ROM into your DVD drive, it will
automatically get noticed and mounted for you. Well, let me amend that;
this is what happens if you run Gnome or KDE (and possible XFCE as
well), because they take care of all of the necessary magic for you. If
you are crazy enough to run some sort of hand-crafted environment, you
get to set up something to do this yourself.

In [[the old days MyCustomFedora8Environment]] you could just run
the Gnome program that did all of this magic and everything worked.
By the time Fedora 10 rolled around, this no longer worked for me
and I had to find another solution. The best one that I found is
a program called [[_halevt_ http://www.nongnu.org/halevt/]].

Halevt basically works just like _gnome-volume-manager_ used to.
You start it during your session initialization (backgrounded) and
it automatically mounts new volumes that show up for you. The only
difference is that you use _halevt-umount_ to unmount volumes, instead
of _gnome-umount_, and it has slightly different command line options.

However, there is a hitch.  Halevt is packed for Fedora 14, but
unfortunately the package is broken by default because it no longer
includes a necessary configuration file.  The version of _halevt_
packaged for Fedora jumped significantly between Fedora 13 and Fedora
14, and I don't think the packaging has caught up; the Fedora 13 version
packaged and used a suitable default configuration file, and the Fedora
14 version doesn't really.

Fortunately we can fix this in a relatively simple way; we just need
to extract the configuration file from the Fedora 13 version of the
_halevt_ RPM and then put it where _halevt_ will find it. The procedure
for that goes like this:

* make sure that you have the _yum-utils_ RPM installed so that you
  have the _yumdownloader_ command.
* get a copy of the Fedora 13 RPM:
	_cd /tmp_ \\
	_yumdownloader --releasever 13 halevt_

  (I will pause to sing the praises of _--releasever_ [[some more
  YumDowngradeTricks]], because it's made trivial something that
  would otherwise be a huge pain in the rear.)

* extract the file:
	_rpm2cpio halevt-* | cpio -id ./usr/share/halevt/halevt.xml_

* copy it to where _halevt_ expects to find it:
	_mkdir $HOME/.halevt_ \\
	_cp usr/share/halevt/halevt.xml $HOME/.halevt/_

You can modify the _halevt.xml_ configuration file if you want to.
Personally, I changed the mount options by taking out '_sync_' and
adding '_relatime,shortname=lower_'.

(I hate having MS-DOS filesystems shout at me, even if it is
theoretically their natural state.)