[phisigma]

Hello, folks!

I installed Kodi Krypton on my Debian Stretch system. In contrast to further versions I now cannot access to USB devices I plug in – they are not mounted automatically, and it seems that you cannot do it manually, too. I suppose the reason for this behaviour is that Stretch does not have the package usbmount. When I start Gnome instead of Kodi automount works as expected.

I know there are several topics online how to reach automount functionality (even in this forum), but some don’t work, some are very complicated, some are too old. So: Is there perhaps someone here who also uses debian stretch as a base for his kodi system and who can help me?

I just want to have back the default behavior. Perhaps there is just a kodi option or a debian package to be needed to install? I would appreciate a simple, straightforward solution :-)

Thanks,
Frank

[wsnipex]

kodi 17 supports udisks for automounting, but debian has migrated to udisks2.
Kodi 18 supports udisks2

[phisigma]

Ok, but what can I do considering that my debian stretch uses 17? Somehow switch back to udisks?

[wsnipex]

yes, or compile kodi 18 from source. Debians kodi package is not supported here, just fyi

[phisigma]

Kodi from source is a little bit too sophisticated for me.

It seems plausible not to support every linux distribution, but as this is the Linux subforum and debian is not the most eccentric distribution, I thought someone perhaps has the same problem. So still kindly asking for a simple solution.

[wsnipex]

you can try udevil or a plain udev rule for automounting outside of kodi

[phisigma]

udev, udevil and udisks all sound good, but I need some details – a step-by-step guidance would be great. As I said there are a lot of howtos in the Internet, but none fits sufficiently to my case.

[wsnipex]

kodi is just an application in that case. So any tutorial for udevil should work.

Add the polkit file from https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=231955 and
start devmon in the background (devmon &) before (auto) starting kodi.

[phisigma]

First of all, as there is no “trick” within Kodi (that was one of my questions), this is a non-Kodi issue and this thread is a little bit misplaced here in a Kodi forum.

wsnipex, thanks for clarifying that and thanks for trying to help. I did not use your hint with the polkit file (amongst other things because that script seems basically to be designed for shutdown and suspend permissions).

I tried www.axllent.org/docs/view/auto-mounting-usb-storage without success (even added exfat as filetype!) and also saw that this seems to be a common problem. See a German and an English forum thread, both without a real solution.

Nevertheless, the last link helped to give a very dirty workaround: Just add the line

Code:

UUID=bla-bla /mnt/usb auto auto,nofail 0 2

to /etc/fstab.

Indeed, automount when Kodi is already running, works – but only for this certain USB stick. As I always use the same one, that’s ok. Furthermore, you cannot unmount the stick manually.

I am not going to mark this topic as solved, but for now I am halfway satisfied.

[Schenckmeier]

I did it in the past with following solution with kodi v17, working on debian or ubuntu:

Code:

apt install usbmount ntfs-3g

nano /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf

Code:

FILESYSTEMS="vfat ntfs fuseblk ext2 ext3 ext4 hfsplus"
FS_MOUNTOPTIONS="-fstype=ntfs-3g,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 -fstype=fuseblk,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 -fstype=vfat,gid=1000,uid=1000,umask=007"

nano /etc/udev/rules.d/usbmount.rules

Code:

KERNEL=="sd*", DRIVERS=="sbp2",         ACTION=="add",  PROGRAM="/bin/systemd-escape -p [email protected] $env{DEVNAME}", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}+="%c"
KERNEL=="sd*", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb",       ACTION=="add",  PROGRAM="/bin/systemd-escape -p [email protected] $env{DEVNAME}", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}+="%c"
KERNEL=="ub*", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb",       ACTION=="add",  PROGRAM="/bin/systemd-escape -p [email protected] $env{DEVNAME}", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}+="%c"
KERNEL=="sd*",                          ACTION=="remove",       RUN+="/usr/share/usbmount/usbmount remove"
KERNEL=="ub*",                          ACTION=="remove",       RUN+="/usr/share/usbmount/usbmount remove"

nano /etc/systemd/system/[email protected]

Code:

[Unit]
BindTo=%i.device
After=%i.device

[Service]
Type=oneshot
TimeoutStartSec=0
Environment=DEVNAME=%I
ExecStart=/usr/share/usbmount/usbmount add
RemainAfterExit=yes

[phisigma]

As I wrote in the beginning, there is no package usbmount in Debian Stretch. Probably working for most other distros.

[Schenckmeier]

You can try to build usbmount from github:

Code:

apt-get install debhelper
git clone https://github.com/rbrito/usbmount.git
cd usbmount
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b
cd ..
dpkg -i usbmount_0.0.24_all.deb

[phisigma]

Sorry for the delay, I finally found time to do it. usbmount should now be installed.

Schenckmeier, could you please help me one more time? As I experienced, the adjustments from your first post are still necessary, of course. My USB stick uses exfat – could you please tell me the content of /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf once again? Or is it absolutly easy, that is just add exfat to the first line “FILESYSTEMS”?