Flakey Drive Icons on desktop and "Computer"
 

I am using Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary) with the latest updates applied.

First off, my main desktop of choice is slackware and I have Gnome 2.10 installed and functioning correctly with this distro (freerock) but with the 2.4.30 kernel. So I am fairly certain this is not a Gnome 2.10 "feature", but it may be the 2.6 kernel - I do not have much experience with 2.6 - or maybe udev or some combination of everything.

The problem is this: My drive icons, when mounted, do not show up on the desktop. This would not be such a big deal, but the drive icons, when listed in the "computer" browser from the "places" menu drop-down are not correctly labled with the mount-point names. They instead have a generic name with the drive size listed. This again would not be an issue, but I have 10 mountable partitions - all the same size - so I cannot tell which is which without mounting and looking at the contents of each one untill I find the one I want.

What is even stranger is that from time to time this issue corrects itself! Sometimes after an auto-upgrade/update. Most recently after compiling a program from source and running ldconfig, then rebooting. When the problem is "corrected", all the mounted drives show up on the desktop and are labled by their correct name from fstab. If I log out of X (not reboot) and log back in, the problem is back again, though occasionally a reboot is required to break things again. I have tried upgrading, or adding programs via synaptic to see if this "fix" is consistant, but it is not. I cannot reproduce it - it is, as far as I can tell, entirely random. The drive icons are "broken" 99% of the time.

Additionally, the mounting of a CD-ROM does create a desktop icon at all times and the CD-ROM, ZIP, and FLOPPY icons in the "Computer" browser are always labled correctly. I believe the Zip drive icon is also correctly appearing when a disk is inserted and mounted (I would check, but I am in slackware now)

I had a slightly similar problem (no icons on the desktop for mounted drives) in slackware and freerock's 2.10 Gnome, but changing options in my fstab corrected this. I attempted to change settings in the fstab file in Ubunto but this made no difference.

I am most intrigued by the infrequent and random "corrections" of this problem. Things must be set correctly overall, but are over-ridden by some other setting that occasionally fails.

Any ideas on what to look at would be appreciated. I am stumped.

Sorry this is so long, but Murphy dictates that the longer and more detailed the question, the shorted and simpler the fix is (and the stupider the poster feels when he sees the answer) ;)

Thanks for reading.

In case anyone is interested, further investigation points to bug(s) in hald and/or gnome-vfs-daemon.
stopping and re-starting gnome-vfs-daemon brings back the icons.

ugly.

I'm using slackware-10.1 (w/ latest 2.6 kernel) and freerock gnome. After adding udev/dbus/hal support (with fstab-sync) I think I am at the place where you are with ubuntu.

My problem is by adding hotswap disk drivers, usb disks etc. If I plug them, hal recognizes and notifies gnome-volume-manager which also mounts them as configured. After the mount, a nautilus window also pops up showing the mount point and drive content. But neither the computer:// is refreshed (not showing the hotplugged device/mount) nor the desktop icons.

Actually this new device is recognized by gnome-vfs-daemon. From command line, it is accessible by gnomevfs-ls command. (gnomevfs-ls "computer:///"). Somehow, gnome-vfs-daemon should notify nautilus of the new device to update desktop/computer:///.

If I insert a cd into one of the optical drives (configured to automount/auto play dvd/all of the fancy things), gnome-volume-manager mounts, notifies gnome-vfs-daemon and gnome-vfs-daemon notifies nautilus to update listing. At this point, if the listing is refreshed, my hotplugged device also appears (as it was already recognized by gnome-vfs-daemon, but nautilus did not refresh listing)

There are possibilities to force nautilus to refresh the listing (in computer:/// and also the desktop icons).. One is killing and restarting nautilus, killing and restarting gnome-vfs-daemon (which you also found)
and also automounting a cd etc.

For a temporary hack, I added the code to kill gnome-vfs-daemon into the gnome-volume-manager (for the devices for which notification doesn't work). This solves the visible problem (but I'm not confortable with killing gnome-vfs-daemon everytime I connect a drive)

I couldn't find anybody having the same problem till now. There should be a proper descriptive name for the problem but I don't know.

If I have time, I will probably invastigate it further and understand how the notification/signaling actually works. After then I can create a patch for this specific problem (without killing g.-vfs-daemon)