xfce and mounting

[Tino Keitel]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 20:04:11 +0200, Mads Michelsen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to understand about mounting and what role XFCE/thunar plays in
> it and how to control it.
> 
> 1) Who does what? What does HAL do, what does thunar (volman) do? And I take
> it that the Places panel-plugin is just a shortcut for the thunar
> functionality?

AFAIK HAL detects new devices, and generates a dbus message. The dbus
session of the user that is logged in processes the dbus message, and
sends it to Thunar. Thunar then uses libexo to mount/umount/eject
devices (see the exo-mount manpage).

> 2) Is there a way to control the (auto)mounting of external filesystems same
> way as /etc/fstab controls those mounted at boot? (i.e mountpoint, owner,
> options, etc.)?

You can create own fdi files for HAL, but exo is somewhat limited when
it comes to the usage of HAL properties.

> 3) I'd like to be able to control some simple mounting/unmounting operations
> by way of shortcut keys and incorporate some functionality into scripts,
> e.g. toggle mount status for drive X, mount-if-not-currently-mounted, drop
> all external mounts etc. Using umount and mount just doesn't seem to
> integrate well with thunar's mounting: manually mounting a drive that is
> registered as a drive in the places plugin seems to confuse it (directing
> thunar to the mount point results in a neverending load). Also, I can
> unmount whatever thunar has (auto)mounted using umount, but umount requires
> root privileges and the places plugin doesn't. So is there a way to do these
> operations by sending commands to thunar/places/HAL (as I said in the first
> question, I'm really not sure what does what)?

Just use exo-mount in your scripts.

Regards,
Tino