How To Make USB Drive Writeable?

[Mark Greenwood]

This has been bugging me for some time. It's not KDE specific because it does it on Ubuntu and Mythbuntu boxes too, but I'll limit this to what happens on Kubuntu.

I have an external USB hard drive. When I connect it to my computer, running Karmic, the New Device Notifier thing pops up and says I've inserted a new disc and would I like to open it with Dolphin. "Why yes I would", I reply, "otherwise why would I have plugged it in?".... Ahem... Anyway, a Dolphin window for the drive duly opens but I do not have permission to write files to it. Why does the system allow me to mount the disc as a normal user and then forbid that user to write to it? It's extremely unhelpful.

What I've done as a workaround is to switch to a terminal, "sudo mkdir" a bunch of directories, and then change the permissions on those directories so that the user who says "Yes I want to mount the disc" is also able to actually use it. But I feel there must be some neater, policy type way of achieving this, so that my normal user can create directories at the root of mounted external discs, but if there is I've yet to find it. Does anybody know? Mandriva didn't annoy me like this... (and if that's not flame-bait I don't know what is :) )

Thanks,

Mark