[lug] adding supermount to Red Hat

[John Karns]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, qqq1one @yahoo.com said:

> Can anyone recommend a good way to go about adding
> supermount capability to a Red Hat (not Mandrake)
> distribution?  I'd like to be able to use floppies
> without having to manually do a umount/mount cycle
> every time I put in a new floppy.
>
> I know that at least part of the supermount capability
> is included in the initscripts package that comes with
> Mandrake linux.
>
> Am I on the right track here?  In Mandrake, it looks
> like there is kernel module called supermount.o and
> also a /usr/sbin/supermount script which modifies
> /etc/fstab to do supermount on the cdrom and floppy.
> I wasn't able to see where these are built by the
> source version of the rpm.  The word "super" does not
> seem to appear in any of the files in the source rpm
> version of the package.
>
> Any ideas on how to go about this?  Is there an easier way?

Well, provided that you're using (v)fat formatted floppies (vfat will
preserve the long filenames), then you can simply install the mtools pkg,
which will provide a subset of the old msdog (msd) commands, such as
mcopy, mdel, mtype, etc.  These allow one to manipulate files on a
diskette w/o dealing with the mount/umount commands, and use long
filenames.  I find it more convenient to use since floppies these days are
pre-formatted and so that I can transfer files between Linux and the other
os.  Mtools also includes a nice "fast format" - mformat, equivalent to
the msd command "format /q".

OTOH, I have also thought about trying to implement supermount on my boxes
since I saw it on a Mandrake install, although for mounting CD's.
Currently I use autofs, but my gripe is that the mountpoint dir is
volatile, so it doesn't play as nicely with shells like mc, as does
supermount.

I did once try to set it up by installing the rpm, but I was missing some
parts, probably the kernel component you mentioned.

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net