How to: Fix automount of USB/MMC/SD etc.

Hi all,

After i have modded my desktop according to rjm's excellent How to, i recognized, like some others, that the automount functionality was broken.

After trying out some commands and manually starting the Thunar daemon i found the problem. The reason is, that the Thunar daemon is started at a time, where the HAL daemon is not running. And this locks the functionality of automount.

Acer was aware of this problem and considered it in the script /usr/bin/xfcepost. Only thing is, that if the Thunar daemon is already running, it is not restarted.

• So to fix this, open a terminal and type

          sudo mousepad /usr/bin/xfcepost &

• Insert 'killall Thunar' right before 'sleep 10' so it looks like this:

          if [ "X${halpid}" != "X" ]; then
            killall Thunar
            sleep 10

• Save & restart and automount should work as usual!

If you want to show icons for your removable drive on the desktop (very comfortable), you have to add some more to the xfcepost script.

• At the end of the file after done add:

          done
          # restart Xfce Desktop
          /usr/bin/xfdesktop-xfce --quit & >/dev/null 2>&1
          sleep 1
          /usr/bin/xfdesktop-xfce & >/dev/null 2>&1

• Additional you need to edit/create /home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/xfdesktoprc

          mousepad /home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/xfdesktoprc &

    add following setting:

[file-icons]
show-removable=true

• Again Save & restart and your removable drives will show up on desktop.

For the guru's out there:

I think the thunar daemon is started by xfdesktop via a call to dbus service org.xfce.FileManager or org.xfce.Thunar.

But I haven't found out where/when the xfce session manager is started from the rc5 scripts. The best solution for this problem would be to start the hald long before xfdesktop. Perhaps anybody can help on this?