On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 10:36:50AM +0100, Uwe Brauer wrote:
> [...]
> 
> By 
> 
>  sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/USB
> 
> It is mounted as root and is not writable by the common (non root) user.

You can specify options in /etc/fstab; if you give the option `user'
for a file system, also ordinary users are allowed to mount that
file system. Only the user who mounted it (and root, of course) can
umount the FS.

If you give the option `users', any user can mount the FS, and any
user can umount it.

There's also the `owner' option, which restricts the rights to mount
a file system to the user who is the owner of the underlying device
file. Unless a daemon does its proper work (which seems to not be
the case here), you had to involve some other means to set the owner
as desired... one example is udev (nice introduction can be found at
http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html), but this is indeed
a bit lower level than a desktop environment.

Good luck,

Jagged