> I cannot understate the amount of functionality that was
> lost when HAL was abandoned.  It will take a long time to rebuild
> everything to the same level of functionality that once was available through HAL.

Doesn't matter what was lost. :-) TDE is DEAD without automounting. I don't envision any user tolerating that loss of functionality. "Long time" won't cut the cheese with most users --- they'll move on.

Did the OpenSuse KDE3 people resolve this problem?

> I assume basic manual (non-automatic) mounting is working on
> your test system?

I did not try anything related to that. Why bother with convoluted circa 1999 mounting work-arounds? :-(

Darrell