Why I have the best and most beautiful wife in the world!

Today was my birthday. I’m old, or at least, getting older.

Why is my wife so great? Well, she is beautiful, a great mom and very smart. Also, she gave me a MP3 player today: that’s right, I got a nice Benq Joybee 110. I’m very happy.

Back to the serious stuff. When you get such a device, you got to make it work with Linux. So I plug the device… and it immediately shows up when I type “dmesg”… something like this appears…

USB Mass Storage device found at 3
usb 1-3: USB disconnect, address 3
ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.2: wakeup
usb 1-3: new full speed USB device using address 4
scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
  Vendor: BenQ      Model: Joybee 110        Rev: 1.00
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
SCSI device sda: 506368 512-byte hdwr sectors (259 MB)
sda: assuming Write Enabled
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
 /dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0: p1
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Attached scsi generic sg0 at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0,  type 0

In case this doesn’t work out and you are using gentoo, then make sure you have hotplug installed, if not, do it now:

emerge hotplug
rc-update add hotplug default

And while you are at it, install coldplug too so that USB devices are recognized during boot, not just when they are inserted:

emerge coldplug
rc-update add hotplug boot

Ok, back to the output of dmesg, it seems the device is at ” /dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0″, how do I mount this?

 > ls /dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0
disc  generic  part1

Aah! Ok… so maybe I should try mounting “/dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/disc”. Let’s see if I can get some info about it…

> fdisk /dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/disc
Commande (m pour l'aide): p
Disque /dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: 259 Mo, 259260416 octets
16 têtes, 32 secteurs/piste, 989 cylindres
Unités = cylindres de 512 * 512 = 262144 octets
                           Périphérique Amorce    Début         Fin      Blocs    Id  Système
/dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/part1   *           1         989      253152+   6  FAT16

Ok, so, it is now telling that “/dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/part1” is a FAT16 (Microsoft-style) disk. I suspect that I could actually reformat the disk to anything I want at this point. Fine, I go into /etc/fstab, and I add the following line:

/dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /mnt/joybee vfat defaults,noauto,users,sync 0 0

(See update below, using /dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 is a bad idea!)

It seems to me the “sync” option is important: don’t delay writes in case the device is unplugged by accident. Then, after creating the directory “/mnt/joybee”, I mount it like so…

mount /mnt/joybee

Next, the following python script can be used to copy the content of a m3u file to the device:

import shutil,re
f = open('indiscover.m3u') #only contains file paths
# optionnally, I could clear /mnt/joybee/mp3
for file in f:
  file = file.rstrip()
  print file
  shutil.copy(file,'/mnt/joybee/mp3')

Of course, the script could be a lot smarter, but I’ve got a wife to kiss. And voilà! Who said anything about Linux being hard to use?

Am I done? Not really, my kernel has no support for either supermount or automount, so I’ll need to fix this (back in a few hours). The problem right now is that I need to type “mount /mnt/joybee” when I plug the device and “umount /mnt/joybee” before I unplug it. I bit annoying.

In order to automount, make sure you compile your kernel with support for automount (with genkernel, go under File Systems>Kernel Automounter). You also need to install autofs:

emerge autofs
rc-update add autofs default

Then add the following line to file /etc/autofs/auto.master (not /etc/auto.master!!!):

/misc /etc/autofs/auto.misc --timeout 1

and add the following line to /etc/autofs/auto.misc (not /etc/auto.misc!!!):

joybee -users,sync,fstype=vfat,rw :/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1

That’s pretty much it, then you should be able to cd to /misc/joybee and see your files.

In practice though, I’m not sure it is so great to have automount. Maybe I can simply modify my script above so it mounts and umounts as it needs since I’m unlike to “cd” to my player very often. Indeed, there are problems with automount, at least on my machine. If I try to reload autofs because I’ve changed the configuration, it goes dead and it can’t recover (short of rebooting which I never do). I’ve read somewhere that I must make sure nothing is automounted before I play with autofs. Seems somewhat a weak design. They claim that if nothing is automounted, you can safely stop the deamon: seems to fail here. However, from the man page, it seems that reloading the deamon should be rarely needed. Anyhow, seems like submount would be a better alternative?

Update: Using hard coded paths like /dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 is bad since they will change from time to time. On my machine, it can become /dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 and so on. I believe that if you have “udev” installed (do “emerge udev”), then it gets mapped to /dev/sda1 “always” according to some magically rules I haven’t checked. So, use “/dev/sda1” throughout above for better results.

Update 2: On recent kernels with udev, you simply do “mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb” and you are in business. The following line should appear in all /etc/fstab files these days.
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb auto noauto,user,umask=111 0 0
Also, it seems like software called hal is able to automount your devices in the /media directory.