Xwindow advise needed

[Polytropon]

On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 20:25:53 -0700 (MST), Warren Block wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Dec 2014, Polytropon wrote:
> >
> > For a long time, Xfce has been considered the "less fatty
> > desktop" in comparison to the "big players" Gnome and KDE.
> > But with the growing incompatibilities btweeen FreeBSD and
> > Linux (the system Xfce is primarily being developed on and
> > for), you might experience missing functionality.
> 
> I use xfce.  The only thing that does not work on FreeBSD, as far as I 
> know, is automounting.  There are other ways to do that.  I just 
> manually mount stuff.  Otherwise, xfce has the standard desktop features 
> without being resource-hungry or having a huge list of dependencies.

The problem is not the automounter itself. It's its
integration with the GUI elements, in two ways:

1st, when the automounter mounts a device which has
been appearing, either by a label or by a device name,
this new mountpoint must be "picked up" by the GUI
and be shown on the desktop.

2nd, there must be a desktop action to unmount the
device, and for those which support it, eject it.

This is what "ordinary users" seem to expect.

I didn't get that working in Xfce, and also failed
with Gnome 2 (even though I followed the advice on
the project page exactly). I somehow got the additional
port automounter to do what HAL + DBUS were unable
to do. To perform the umount, I still had to replace
the _binary_ with a script, including a terrible tale
of sudo, -f, and camcontrol eject. That was the time
when I stopped worrying and love the insanity. :-)

I'm quite confident that, given a proper configuration
and permissions, this _won't_ be neccessary in Xfce.

By the way, how about suggesting Lumina, the upcoming
"unified" GUI project for FreeBSD? Does it integrate
already with automounter or autofs?

Just to add a short note about automounting in general:
While this is a useful feature for most _personal_ desktop
computer usage, there might be situations where it can
cause immense trouble, like people stealing data, or
putting (incriminating) data on your system. It's also
dangerous when you attach a device that you want to
perform forensic analysis or data recovery on - one
stupid write, and you're out of luck. That's why I'd
like to see a more differentiated approach in _any_ of
the desktop environments supporting mounts:

a) signal the appearing of a new device to the user,
   who can then select to mount it or just to leave
   it as is; or

b) automatically mount a new device and show an icon
   shortcut to the mountpoint.

The user should be able to select which policy to apply.
For optical media, _blank_ optical media, it gets even
more funny, let alone music CDs... :-)


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