User problem with automounting of camera in KDE

[Klaus-Peter Schrage]

Tim Wunder schrieb:
> Using FC5 and KDE 3.5.4 (from kde-redhat) in a multi-user environment (me, my 
> wife, and my son). 
> 
> When I plug our camera into the USB port, I get a dialog asking me what to do 
> with the newly found device, regardless of the number of other users logged 
> in, or the order in which we log in. I can open it in a new window, and have 
> access to the pictures through media:/camera. 
> 
> However, my wife's user code does not get this dialog. When she plugs the 
> camera in, she always gets this error mesage: "Cannot find parent item 
> media:/ in the tree. Internal error."
> If no one else is logged in, or if she was the first to log in, the camera 
> will get mounted and Konqueror's file manager will open media:/camera and 
> she'll have access to the pictures despite the error message. If she plugs 
> the camera in and another user is logged into the system before her, she just 
> gets the error message and cannot access the pictures in the camera. 
> (media:/camera opens in konqueror to a blank page).
> 
> This doesn't seem to be a console.perms problem as I have the following 
> in /etc/security/console.perms.d/50-default.perms:
> <console>  0666 <camera>     0660 root.users
> 
> When I plug in the camera and get the dialog, there's a checkbox to always do 
> this with that kind of device (I forget the specific text as I'm not local to 
> the box right now). I'm guessing that she's checked that, and there's 
> something borken in the way it's handling things now. 
> 
> If that's the case, then something in ~/.kde is causing the problem. But 
> what ? Ideas?

I never had this problem on FC5, because I usually don't use it in multi 
user mode, but I was able to reproduce what you described with my 
camera. I don't know much about the ways permissions are handled with 
respect to pluggable USB devices, but these seem to be controlled by 
pam_console. I found out that, when plugging in the camera, that very 
user gets the necessary permissions who is listed in 
/var/run/console/console.lock, and that seems to be the one who has 
logged in first. You can observe how permissions are set by
ls -lR /proc/bus/usb/

I didn't' dig any further, but it seems to be possible to change the 
behavior of pam_console, so perhaps man console_pam might give you some 
clues.
Klaus