Movies without drama: Easily use Linux USB drives with Plex
How to install Plex the way it expects, prepare a USB mount Plex can read, and avoid the common permission pitfalls that block access to media on Linux external drives.
Useful takeaways from this story.
Create a mount point owned by the plex user (for example /plex-usb) rather than in a home directory.
Avoid snaps and flatpaks that may not create the plex user and can lead to permission failures.
# Overview
# Install Plex the way it expects Use the official installers for the best chance that Plex creates the plex user automatically. According to the article, snaps, flatpaks, and distro repo packages often failed to create that user during the author's testing.
- Arch/Manjaro: The AUR package worked for the author. Use an AUR helper (example: yay) and install with: yay -S plex-media-server
- Fedora: Download the official RPM and install it. The article shows wget to retrieve the RPM and sudo dnf install to install it.
- Ubuntu/Debian: Add Plex's repository and signing key, then sudo apt update and sudo apt install plexmediaserver. The article lists the sequence of apt and curl/gpg commands to set up the Plex repository and keyring first.
After installation on any distribution, enable and start the Plex service with systemctl:
sudo systemctl enable plexmediaserver sudo systemctl start plexmediaserver
# Create a mount point Plex can access Do not put the mount point inside a user home directory. Create it in the root filesystem and change ownership to plex so the plex user has access.
Example commands shown in the article:
# Find the USB drive's UUID and filesystem type Before mounting, identify the device and its UUID so you can mount it consistently. The article suggests using blkid and filtering for /dev/sd devices:
Devices typically appear as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc. Note the UUID and the Type (filesystem) reported by blkid. If you have trouble identifying the drive, unplug it, run the command, then plug it in and run the command again to spot the new entry.
# What this solves and where people get stuck
After you've identified the UUID and created a mount point owned by plex, the logical next actions are to mount the drive (manually or via /etc/fstab) and then add the Movies/Shows directories under that mount as Plex library sources. The article provides commands for the install, mount-point creation, and discovery steps you need to reach that point.
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