What's the official best way to use an USB external disk?

[Jose Gomez-Dans]

Hi!
I have an external USB disk, where I store (among many other things),
my music collection and data used by programs that tend to have "hard
wired" paths in them. Stuff like /media/ExternalDrive/ should be how
these files and directories should be accessed every time. Moreover, I
want the disk to be automatically mounted when it is plugged in. And I
also have a digital camera, which should behave in the same way.

 I understand that with the advent of pmount, hal and so on, it is
possible to have this done. However, I don't know how to go on about
it. It appears that my version of Kubuntu doesn't do this by default.
I have to go round mounting the icons that appear on the desktop.

Is my sought-after behaviour enabled by default (or can it be easily
enabled)? There are some details on how to do what I want in
<http://floatingsun.net/articles/howtos/howto-usb-automount.html>, but
I see that there are udev directories and so on in /etc/, so maybe
it's already installed and half-configured?

Any hints appreciated :D
Cheers!