Automount in LXDE or Xfce

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 07:31:26 -0600 (MDT), Warren Block wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Mar 2014, Polytropon wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 29 Mar 2014 08:46:25 -0700 (PDT), Beeblebrox wrote:
> >>> Can anyone maybe share a _working_ configuration example?
> >>
> >> You have two choices for daemon: hald or devd. As you are aware, hald is
> >> linux-based and devd is native FreeBSD, but still somewhat experimental.
> >> Your choice as to which one (and why) will be preferred.
> >
> > I know that HAL is already deprecated in Linux world in favour
> > of udev, upower et al. and doesn't fully work in FreeBSD. At
> > the time it will work perfectly, nobody will be using it, like
> > APM. :-)
> >
> > The desktop per se does _not_ matter, be it Xfce (which is
> > missing icons and cannot shutdown the system)
> 
> misc/gnome-icon-theme and misc/gnome-icon-theme-extras provide a full 
> set of icons.  They are different from xfce's but better-looking IMO.

I've finally installed Gnome and used that as a desktop
environment.



> xfce can reboot or shut down a system.  The file
> /usr/local/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/org.freedesktop.consolekit.pkla 
> must be created as shown in the pkg-message of one of the xfce ports, 
> and xfce must be started with with ConsoleKit support:
> 
> startxfce4 --with-ck-launch

Yes, this worked. Maybe it was this file, or one of the
enormous amounts of changes I had to perform. :-)



> There are several ports that handle automount.  I used my own script for 
> that, but recently went back to manual mounting for simplicity.

Nothing worked as shown in the documentation (Gnome FAQ
which refers to HAL FAQ). Finally I installed the automounter
port which also didn't fully work. I had to change lots
of permissions and files, create own scripts, include them
for the Gnome users (individually), and now it _almost_
works, which means, it sometimes shows error boxes about
not being able to mount a media, except that the media
is mounted, and I replaced the umount binary with a
custom script to add -f and "cdcontrol eject" if called
for the CD drive. The part "unmounting mounted devices"
was the most problematic one if you consider that USB
media (disks, sticks and cards) aren't really hot-pluggable
storage. With the help of automount.conf and a local
devd.conf things would at least work when the user
remembers to "eject media" (don't know the english
term in Gnome, the german version says "Medium aushängen"
or "Medium auswerfen"). And apropos language support:
It could be better.

In my limited experience, the whole experience is lacking.
I have to admit that I think my "user experience" is better
on my home box where I manually "mount /something", and
a consistend english UI / GUI is more appealing.

Furthermore, I had to fight two "Win-Printers", an
inkpee and a laser printer, both USB, 5 years old,
which I also got working, which is impossible! Both
required CUPS fiddling, symlinking across the OS
and /compat/linux. Don't ask me how I did get them
working, I had to erase everything from my memory
because it would have driven me mad. :-)

So far regarding my visit in "Desktop Land". :-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...