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Contents

Introduction
Mounting devices
Renaming USB Drives
Actions on Plugging in
USB Modems
Compatible Hardware
External Links

Introduction

USB is an abbreviation for Universal Serial Bus. USB is a standard type of port for connecting peripherals to your computer. A USB device can be used as soon as it is connected, without having to reboot the computer.

Mounting devices

The mount command makes a directory accessible by attaching a root directory of one file system to another directory, which makes all the file systems usable as if they were subdirectories of the file system they are attached to. USB drives should be automatically mounted, with an icon appearing on the desktop.

See Mount/USB for more information on mounting USB drives.

Renaming USB Drives

See Renaming USB drives.

Actions on Plugging in

Often, you may want to automate things when connecting a USB drive (USB Stick, external USB harddisk) to your computer. Typical use cases are:

you want to copy images from a flash drive to your photo collection, delete them on the usb drive, and show them automatically
you connect a USB harddisk to the computer and the computer should backup some data to it
you connect an encrypted usb store and want the system to mount the encrypted harddisk

This used to be done with hotplug but in later linux distros is done using udev and module-init-tools.

What you need to do is setup a script that is triggered when the device is plugged in.

See Have something happen when you plug in a USB device.