Greetings, all. This is my first time asking for help on LQ, so I hope to accurately describe my situation, while also keeping within proper forum etiquette. Please feel free to critique me wherever I may come up short in that respect, so that I can improve with any future posts. With that in mind, here I go!
Brief Overview of my Environment
Slackware64 14.2
Kernel 4.4.172
OpenBox 3.6.1 from slackbuilds.org
PCManFM 1.3.1 from slackbuilds.org
Problem Description
I recently decided to change my default runlevel from 3 to 4 in inittab, and to use KDM for my graphical login. Ever since doing so, whenever I plug in an external storage device such as a USB thumb drive or HDD, it does not show up in the left-hand pane of either PCManFM or Thunar as a device available to be mounted on-the-fly. However, a "new" device called "floppy" appears in that list which wasn't present before, and I do not have a floppy disk drive attached to my system. Most of the searching I've done on this issue turns up articles about "device not auto-mounting", and the suggestions were to install
udiskie or similar tools for automounting. But lack of
auto "mounting" is not necessarily my issue, rather that the device plugged in doesn't show up at all.
dmesg output proves to me that the OS recognizes I've plugged in the device, I can see it with an
fdisk -l and can manually mount it from the shell if I so choose, but the convenient "click-to-mount" is no longer available. Rebooting the PC and plugging in the device pre-boot doesn't resolve either, so it doesn't appear to be related to hot plugging of devices. Incidentally, while typing this post, I've also just noticed that my Openbox "Applications" menu (pipemenu that executes /usr/bin/openbox-menu) stopped working, giving an "invalid response" popup message whenever I hover over it.
All that said, I changed my default runlevel back to 3, rebooted, logged in, and fired up my X session using
startx...bam! Both PCManFM and Thunar now recognize my devices as soon as I plug them in, and my Openbox applications menu works again. So, thinking maybe it's a problem with KDM specifically, I tried setting XDM as my display manager in rc.4 and rebooting again with default runlevel 4. Same issue as with KDM. So it appears the problem occurs when I'm using any DM...firing up my X session and openbox via startx avoids the issue. Of course, I could just keep doing it this way...but I had my reasons for wanting a graphical login (easy one-click switching of DE at login time if I so choose).
I'm stumped by this one, and the best I've gathered in my searches thus far is that something is going on where D-Bus events are not being sent to the appropriate location whenever the DM is in play? Not sure if I'm barking up the right tree with that angle, but I'll be honest that my understanding of how D-Bus works and how to manipulate that is severely lacking, so if this is truly the case I'm not sure where to go next.
I've thus far run
dbus-monitor under both the above scenarios, and the output varies significantly depending on whether or not the DM is in play. Output of dbus-monitor from both scenarios is attached to this post, showing the events that occur immediately after I plug in a USB thumb drive.
I found one article on Gentoo's wiki that I believe somewhat led me onto the right path...
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Openbox, which has a suggestion of adding the following line to my
~/.xinitrc:
Code:
exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session openbox-session
However, this line is already present in my ~/.xinitrc. What I determined from viewing
htop output, however, is that the command above executes whenever I use the startx method, but does not execute when I've logged in from a KDM/XDM prompt. I believe this is directly related to my issue, but don't know what else to do about it.
I should also note that if I choose KDE or XFCE as my DE at the KDM login prompt, neither Thunar nor PCManFM have any trouble seeing my hot-plugged devices.
The issue only occurs when I use KDM/XDM to login with an openbox session.
Any suggestions on what else I should look for, log files to check, or configurations for KDM or D-Bus that I should consider reviewing would be greatly appreciated! I'm banging my head against the desk with this minor yet annoying problem, and my hope is that it's being caused by something trivial that I've missed or am just not aware of due to my limited knowledge.
