Problem umounting USB stick

Strange error message in GNOME

I tested the current GNOME in etch against automatic detection and mount of an USB stick. The good news is that this worked quite well, even with an etch system that has been the result of a distribution upgrade from sarge, at least after additional GNOME and HAL packages have been installed.

However, umounting the stick did not work as expected. When I try to unhook the stick from the system by using the icon on the screen I received the following error message:

   Error

   Cannot unmount volume

   The volume was probably mounted manually on the command line.

   Details

   Device to unmount is not in /media/.hal-mtab so it is not mounted
   by HAL

The message was a little bit different when said file did not exist at all, but the result was the same, the stick couldn't be unmounted by the graphic frontend. Simply touching this file fixed the first problem but resulted in the error message quoted above.

Interestingly, apparently no program wanted to add anything to this file when the stick is mounted. However, one can bypass the umount problem by purging the package gnome-mount. Once this package is gone, the rest of GNOME, HAL and udev behave as expected. The stick is umounted properly and another stick could be mounted again. The file isn't written either, but no program comlains anymore.