live Fedora should not automount

Nick Levinson · #1 25th April 2012, 05:06 PM

A live disc is good for diagnosis and repair. If a problem lurks in local media, I don't want them automounted. I want to mount only by choice. This is particularly important if my compuer is exposed to the Internet and a defect may cause that exposure. Not automounting is impossible to configure on a live disc before intermedia exposure has already occurred (except for networks). The Fedora 16 I downloaded for a live disc automounts, so I can't rely on it for technical problem-solving and so I'm looking for another distro for that purpose. Before I suggest reconfiguring future Fedora versions or producing an additional edition, would that be a bad idea?

AndrewSerk · #2 25th April 2012, 05:19 PM

Hello Nick,
That must be a "bug" in the live media, it should not automount except for a persistent home or swap. Under a "bug free" livecd you would have to add "automount" to the kernel line to automount. You can also add "noswap" to the kernel line to keep from using local swap.

Andrew

Nick Levinson · #3 1st June 2012, 05:20 PM

I found a distro but I haven't tested it much and don't know its reputation, so I'll tell here about it but with a caution that you should check it out regardless of what I've said before you depend on it. Porteus (porteus.org): live CD (easy to write to a disc from the download), 32-bit or 64-bit (download either one), root GUI, and no automounting of drives. I took version 1.1, which was the latest. I read about Porteus in a review at DistroWatch (I think DistroWatch.com). I'm not familiar with it.

PabloTwo · #4 1st June 2012, 05:45 PM

Maybe you should check out the XFCE Live CD spin of either F16 or F17. From the F16 XFCE Live CD, when it's booted, all mountable drives are recognized and a desktop icon placed on the desktop for each, but they are NOT MOUNTED. To mount them, you have to right-click on the icon and select "Mount Volume", or select "Open", which will then mount that partition/drive and launch the Thunar file manager to view it's contents.

Even when plugging in a USB stick, a desktop icon for it will pop up on the desktop for it, but you still have to do the right-click > "Mount Volume" to actually mount it. This is the way it works in the F16 XFCE Live CD (and after install to hdd also). I can't verify if the same behavior exits on the F17 XFCE Live CD.

Nick Levinson · #5 2nd June 2012, 03:53 PM

Thank you. Do you know if root has GUI? My understanding is that Fedora allows only the command-line interface for the root account. And are these features available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions?

PabloTwo · #6 2nd June 2012, 09:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nick Levinson

Thank you. Do you know if root has GUI? My understanding is that Fedora allows only the command-line interface for the root account. And are these features available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions?

If you're asking this about the F16 XFCE Live CD spin, yes and yes. When running the live XFCE Live CD, you just type "su root" into a terminal, and hit the ENTER key when prompted for the password.