auto mount xfce4 and kde

[Mel]

On Monday 03 September 2007 18:58:07 Koen de Wijs wrote:
> Mel schreef:
> > On Friday 31 August 2007 09:41:23 Koen de Wijs wrote:
> >> This week I installed FreeBSD on a computer of mine. Everything works
> >> fine but one thing I can't get working.
> >> Every person should be albe to work with the machine. The only thing
> >> that isn't working is auto-mounting of cd-roms and usb-sticks. If KDE is
> >> started and I put a usb-stick in the computer there should appear a icon
> >> on the desktop with the usb drive on it and that should also work for
> >> cd-roms. On XFCE4 there should also appear an icon;
> >
> > Don't know about XFCE4, but read on.
> >
> >> I also added the regular user to the group operators.
> >
> > You don't wanna do that, unless it's ok with you that a user can get read
> > access to every file on every disk. Operator is meant for backup users.
> >
> >> What do I need to do to get it working?
> >
> > portinstall desktop-bsd-tools and read the instructions about devfs, with
> > a major side-note:
> > ntfs/fat partitions can only be mounted by root, because mount changes
> > the owner of the disk to the underlying directory, so it's likely that
> > your users cannot mount usb-sticks.
> > To automount usb storage devices as root, have a look at usbd(8) and
> > usbd.conf(5). You'll have to provide an unmounter for your users though
> > and instruct them to unmount before removing or things go to hell.
>
> I've got everyting working right now except for the usb stick. I tried
> am-utils but I didn't lik that. Is I tried a lot of things and read a
> lot and everything almost works except for the usb-sticks. Before I will
> be busy with it for a couple of hours is this the way it should work?
> http://caia.swin.edu.au/reports/041130A/
> This website describes how to add usb-devices but is it normal to add an
> extra script with devd or is just some wierd workaround?

That's a very interesting article and explains why my unmounter is never 
called. And yes, it is the proper way. devd (and usbd specifically for usb 
devices) has been created to be able to propagate kernel hardware events to 
user land. It follows unix principles that root is owner of the machine and 
it's resources and decides what to do with it. Using these events one can 
call simple scripts or very complex programs.

As for KDE, also look at dcop. For instance:
dcop --all-users --all-sessions knotify default notify notify Me \
"I just sent you guys a notification. I could use it to tell you that the USB 
stick has been mounted." nosound nofile 2 0

-- 
Mel

People using reply to all on lists, must think I need 2 copies.