plugdev & xfce without desktop icons
 

After making the changes suggested in the sticky about HAL, I could plug in my usb stick and a desktop icon would appear, which could be mounted etc... So far so good. Checking the media directory it turned out to be called /media/disk.

Now I disabled the desktop icons ('Desktop Icons none' in Desktop preferences of XFCE). This seems to disable the whole thing:

The problem is not the mounting of the usb stick. I just want to understand why this happens. Could anyone explain?

I like the idea of having a mount point created automagically for whatever I plug in and being able to mount it as user instead of root; I just don't want to click on some desktop icon...

As I understand it, you need to have Thunar running for automounting to work under XFCE. Since Thunar handles the desktop, if the desktop is disabled, Thunar is not running. You can test this by starting Thunar and then plugging in a USB device, you should see it get mounted in Thunar's left panel.

To get Thunar starting without the desktop icons, run the program "xfce4-autostart-editor", and then click "Add". Here you will see fields for the name, description, and command. Put whatever you want for the first two, and for the command put "thunar --daemon".

When you restart XFCE (no need to restart the machine) Thunar will now be running in the background, but not displaying any desktop icons. Automounting should then work. At the very least, this is what I have been doing since -current to get automouting working without the desktop icons.

Thanks MS3FGX, you're the chef!

But it's still a bit unsatisfactory. Now we've got to click on a thunar icon for /media/disk to show up; instead of a desktop icon. Same difference :-( I like to do my file management on the CLI. Any suggestion for bypassing thunar? Let's suppose we're not running X at all.

In that case you would need to use something like ivman, which is a HAL event handler that operates outside of X or any window manager or desktop environment.

There is no Slackware package for it that I can find, but there is a SlackBuild for it.

thanks, I'll check it out. I'm a bit scared of slackbuilds though, the build for libdvdcss broke my X :-(