Mounting Drives in Linux without Root
=====================================
:author: Aaron Ball
:email: nullspoon@iohq.net


== {doctitle}

I recently took an interest in building my own debian box that was roughly
equivelant to Linux Mint or Ubuntu. More specifically, I wanted a system built
from a bare bones Debian base, but had all the functionality that was offered
by the more major "end user" distributions. I wanted features such as media
capabilities (video, DVDs, and music), surfing the internet, editing photos,
etc.

As I used my system, I took note of what else I needed to add to it to make it
more laptop friendly. One of the things it was missing was the ability to mount
external storage devices (usb sticks for the most part) without being root.
After many days of frustration, I finally caved and started making custom
adjustments outside of simply installing software.  Here is how you mount an
external storage device in Debian Linux without needing root permissions.

It is really quite simple...

First, you need to configure the permissions on your mount location. In Debian
Linux, this location is /media. The permissions on that directory are set by
default to 744. When we mount an external device, we want a directory to be
created in there to give mount a location to mount to.  In light of this, we
need the permissions on the /media directory to be 777. To achieve this, open
your root cli and run the following command:

----
chmod -R 777 /media
----

And you should now be done!

For me however, I experienced a small problem with this. In my /etc/fstab file,
there was an entry for a cdrom located at sdb1 there.  Since that is not where
my cdrom is located, I just commented out that line, and all worked as
expected.

Just one more step towards the perfect Linux system.



Category:Linux


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