Mounting USB external drives in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

I don't believe the data here in is any longer relevant and can be safely archived

We came across this interesting problem with Hardy Heron the other day, we wanted to insert a USB flash drive into a computer running the latest Linux distro and access it's contents. It obviously tried to mount the device into the file system but something was stopping it.

The first thing we tried to do was install additional packages to allow for automatic detection and mounting of a USB, this may have been a mistake in hindsight as the USB device was already detecting devices attached to this port. Previous version of Ubuntu allowed external devices such as USB drives to be automatically detected and mounted it seems with 8.04 allowance is in longer implied it must be directed to do so.

The procedure before installing any other packages is to authorise your desktop session to mount external drives, to achieve this you need select System >> Administration >> Authorization find the section for storage and make two grant entries to mount and eject media. See images below.