Xwindow advise needed

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 10:26:27AM +0100, Polytropon wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Dec 2014 10:02:08 +0100, Roland Smith wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 04:41:47AM +0100, Polytropon wrote:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > It was my impression that the new automount/autofs in 10.1 does *not* do that.
> > AFAICT it tries to mount a filesystem when a directory is accessed.
> > Which is nice for say NFS or SMBFS, but doesn't cater to the common use of
> > using a memstick.
> 
> As far as I remember, the system's amd itsel (not the 
> "automounter" port) is intended for exactly that task,
> and primary targeting the use of NFS. It's not intended
> primarily for the use with removable media, but _can_
> be used for that task.
> 
> The different approach via devd (in Linux: based on
> HAL and DBus, now deprecated, replaced by udisk et al.,
> probably on the road to deprecation, replaced by kdbus)
> is that if a matching device appears, the device is
> being identified and mounted. A notification is then
> provided in some way, for example via FAM (file alteration
> monitor) that watches the mountpoint root directory
> (for example /media) for a new entry, causing the GUI
> to display an icon shortcut, with a context menu entry
> of matching actions (like unmount). As there is no
> "timeout", unmounting has to be ordered manually,
> either by point & click, or via command line.
> 
> Today's automatical mounts have become a great mystery
> to me, I don't entirely understand which parts are involved
> in which way, and how they work, or why they work, so
> I'd be happy about a working solution for the settings
> where this is an "urgent" requirement... :-)

The sysutils/automount shell-script
(https://github.com/vermaden/automount/blob/master/automount)
is activated via devd, latching on to DEVFS CREATE and DESTROY events, see:
https://github.com/vermaden/automount/blob/master/automount_devd.conf.

The script can handle all natively supported filesystems as well as some that
are provided by FUSE (such as NTFS, ext4 and exfat).

If you read the script, it is not that difficult to follow.Since I prefer a
plain window manager to a desktop environment (“DE”), I couldn't say what the
effort would be to integrate it with a DE. Adding on-screen notifications via
libnotify's ``notify-send`` was pretty easy.


Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://rsmith.home.xs4all.nl/
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