Xwindow advise needed

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 30 Dec 2014 21:15:55 -0700 (MST), Warren Block wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Dec 2014, Polytropon wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> At one point, I wrote my own automounter.  xfce or Thunar can add menu 
> entries, and I added one for unmount.

The Gnome 2 system I had installed also had functions
for unmounting, but it simply didn't work (even though
permissions were set up as per the instructions, the
permission was denied). So the system mounted media,
but never unmounted it through the GUI.



> > 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 first could work for all users, really.

I'd say so, too, but some users expect "more". :-)

The basic concept within GUIs is that a process will
monitor a directory for new entries, such as /media,
and when a new entry is being created as a mountpoint,
for example /media/THE_LABEL_OF_THE_DVD or /media/da0,
an icon shortcut will be displayed, together with a
context menu entry to unmount. For Gtk-based environments,
I think FAM (libfam, gio-fam-backend) is the "file
alternation monitor" that's being used.

Do you remember how XFCE (capital letters -> version 3)
did this? They had a xfmount wrapper which would simply
perform "mount <mountpoint>" according to /etc/fstab and
then open a file browser with <mountpoint>; when the file
browser was closed, the xfumount wrapper would be called,
executing "umount <mountpoint>". This of course required
you to make sure the mount points existed and you had to
add the menu entries manually. For a "static system", it
was a good solution, but for today's systems with the many
possibilities of what to attach especially to USB, this
doesn't work anymore.

I also remember that automounting _did_ work in Gnome 1
and many versions of KDE, even before HAL and DBUS did
even exist...



> > 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... :-)
> 
> file(1) can be used to detect many kinds of filesystems and binaries. 
> It could be used to at least suggest mounting or playing options.

I think this magic is somehow included in Gnome. If I
remember correctly, a right click with "open media player"
or "play with <DVD player program" was present for optical
media that was _not_ normal data media.



> How important this is really depends on the user.  Some would say that a 
> GUI for wireless/wired network configuration would be more useful.

For those who use their computer connected to the same wired
interface every day, the importance may vary, but I agree
that a nice replacement for wpagui (I think that was its name,
didn't investigate further, didn't work as expected) would
be a good addition. As I said, Lumina folks seem to try to
get all the parts neccessary for a good desktop environment
togehter, native and working on FreeBSD.



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