Auto-Mounting and Unmounting CDs, DVDs, USB drives etc.

[fedora-list at webterminate.com]

Dear Fedora List,

When I show off my brand new FC3 system to Windows-centric friends, we 
invariably get to a point where they'd like to see me open a Windows Media 
File, or a MS Word Document. I'm proud that Xine and OpenOffice can do that, 
only to be embarassed when my computer won't return the CD they've given me 
the files on. I am not a friend of manually mounting and unmounting drives on 
my home PC (I do know the arguments about security, etc), and to my dismay I 
have found that FC3 continues a long tradition of Linux systems I have used 
in that automounting still does not work properly.
Please Help!!
I'm using KDE, and the system has been upgraded from FC2 (where I also had to 
mount manually, and possibly messed up the setup through installing both 
autofs and am-utils), so maybe that's why I still can't get it to work.
Is it too much to ask for Linux/KDE to do what Windows 95 could do almost 10 
years ago? (sorry ...)
I find the layers of complexity surrounding UDEV and HAL quite disturbing, 
and, frankly, I hope there is a way to get things to work simply and nicely 
without manually editing HAL's XML config files.
So, can somebody please explain to me how to get the following to work as 
non-root user:
1) insert CD
2) find CD mounted somewhere (eg /media/cdrom)
3) browse the directory with konqueror
4) press the eject button on the drive
5) get the CD back a couple of seconds later
6) possibly have the Konqueror window close automatically, or react in some 
way (that's not really important; after all, I know the directory is not 
accessible any more)
with gnome-device-manager (under KDE) the mounting seemed to work fine, but it 
did not unmount (I had to do it manually as root)

I've found in earlier versions of Fedora I always had to kill FAM after 
accessing a CD in KDE, otherwise the CD would still be considered in use. 
Apparently FAM does not exist any more in FC3. Is this correct?

If the above procedure is in fact the standard behaviour of FC3 anyway, I 
guess my setup is to blame. Then I'd ask you to give me some indication of 
what FC3's default setup for handling CDs is. Is am-utils installed? Is 
autofs installed?

Sorry for the rant. I'm simply quite frustrated.

Many thanks,

Florian