[nflug] Flushing a USB drive (and mounting a second partition from my desktop)

[Joe]

I have a USB 250GB hard disk with two partitions on it.  One is for
Windoze and one for Linux.

When I plug it into the usb socket, kubuntu/kde puts an icon on my
desktop for the first partition on the drive (which happens to be the
windows one).

I can mount the second partition (Linux) manually using sudo mount
/dev/sdb2 /media/linusb

* How can I get the second partition to mount just like the first one
does - with no fuss?

* When I want to unplug the drive, how do I flush it (assure that all
writes have completed)?  For the Windoze partition, I just right-click
on the desktop disk icon and select "safely remove".

Thanks.

Joe