USB Mount Options on Debian
Since the latest raft of updates to Debian Testing (currently "wheezy") a couple of problems popped up wherein some of my old configurations were lost or stopped working. (Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention during the upgrade?) One was that usb drives were suddenly being mounted owned by root:root, so I could no longer write to them with my user account. That's no good! That makes it considerably more of a nuisance to sync my Rockbox/iPod. I finally looked into it just now.
I use the usbmount package to handle usb automounting. This is a nice way to go because it works with any configuration and does not depend on your desktop environment. The solution to my current problem was simple enough:
Edit /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf and change the line that gives
FS_MOUNTOPTIONS to:
FS_MOUNTOPTIONS="-fstype=vfat,gid=floppy,dmask=0007,fmask=0117"
The setting is automatically used the next time you plug in a usb drive.
Camera and gPhoto2
By chance I learned another useful thing while researching the above, and it can serve as a coda. My camera is one of the type, or vintage, more accurately, that cannot be mounted as a drive, but instead must be managed with the command line program gphoto2. At some point I don't remember exactly when, gphoto2 stopped allowing me to download images from the camera with my user account. I always had to su or sudo. Turns out, all you need to do is add your user account to the group "camera" and you're good to go.
On to the next thing.
