Re: Solved! USB sticks not recognized

On Sat, 17 Nov 2007, houghi wrote:-

David Bolt wrote:
No, it shouldn't be something the window manager does. I'm not sure, but
I don't actually think it is the window manager that's doing the actual
auto-mounting. I think it's something that's started up by the Gnome,
KDE and Xfce4 desktop initialization that performs the auto-mount.
What's more, it appears that it's only started up when the local desktop
session is started, not a remote one.

Well, it is KDE or GNOME in such a way that it is only launched when KDE
or GNOME are launched and they need KDE and/or GNOME, because otherwise
it doesn't work.

That doesn't explain why Xfce4 also has auto mounting working although,
as discovered a bit below, I found out why it works. There's something
that it uses, that's common to both KDE and Gnome, that the other
desktops don't. I thought it might be they were starting a dbus helper,
or similar, but all the desktops start:

/bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
/usr/bin/dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session $desktop

where $desktop is /usr/bin/startxfce4 for Xfce4, /usr/bin/icewm-session
for IceWM, /opt/kde3/bin/startkde for kde3, etc. However, even though
the dbus-daemon is started, IceWM doesn't auto mount.

That makes me think that something is registering to receive the
messages sent across the dbus message system and is acting on them.
Whatever it is, it's not used in the other desktops.

So no KDE/GNOME, no automaunt. Most likely you could be able to get it
running, but then you would have KDE/GNOME running, basicaly.

Well, Xfce4 isn't like KDE or Gnome. It looks more like Fvwm and/or TWM
than either of the other two, especially with the look of the window
decorations. It does appear to use (some of) the KDE libraries and
applications as the right-click menu on some icons shows a "Open with
Kate" entry.

So for all discusion, it is KDE/GNOME that is doing the automount. The
rest is semantics.

It's something they're using that the others aren't, and my guess is
that almost all the other desktop environments don't use the dbus
message system, and hal, to find out what's been plugged in.

The only way I can see other desktops, or the console, getting the same
ability is for someone to write the required helper.

While having a quick search to see if any of the other distributions had
auto-mounting working for IceWM, purely out of interest, I found out why
Xfce auto-mounts. It has the helper "thunar-volman" to do the same job
as the gnome-volume-manager and KDE auto mount daemon.

At the moment, I'm looking at a possible solution. You probably won't
like it as it relies on gnome-volume-manager to do the auto mounting.


Regards,
David Bolt

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