Automount doesn't work correctly?

Like most things, Knoppix seems to have quite a sophisticated auotmount setup. The setup is itself automatically setup by automount.sh. The problem is I don't think it works as it should/could.

From my understanding (and I seem to recall that at least Corel Linux had this working out of the box) when you are using the autmounter for a floppy (for example) you should be able to type "ls /mnt/floppy/" and get the listing from the floppy, or even hit tab twice and get the list of available options. Essentially it is completely transparent to the user whether or not a device is mounted or automounted. This does not seem to be the case with 2003-11-19.

I've always found the automounter setup quite confusing for some reason (the cryptic man pages), so before I went digging to try and get the behaviour I would expect I am posting here to see if I am missing something obvious, or whether someone else has already solved this (then shouldn't it make it into the next release).