[H-GEN] using a USB thumbrive with Linux

[Christopher Biggs]

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David <davido at bigpond.net.au> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> I have access to a 512M JetFlash USB thumbdrive that I'd like to use with 
> Linux. I've never tried to do anything like this before on Linux.
>

I use a CF card in a small USB reader, but it works the same as the
"flash plug" devices.

Install "usbmgr" which will take care of adding and removing USB modules
for you, not just for usb storage, but for almost all supported USB devices.

Install "autofs" which will mount and unmount filesystems
semi-automatically on-demand (once you configure it).

You now have a USB drive you can plug in and out with relative
abandon.  (run sync before removal, or mount with the 'sync' option)

Having the drive formatted with vfat (windows) filesystem is no
problem, provided you don't expect unix file attributes to be
preserved on files that you copy to that filesystem.

Here's the relevant entry from my /etc/auto.usb (configuration file
for my USB drives).

        cf              -fstype=vfat,sync,gid=floppy,umask=002          :/dev/sda1

--cjb


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