Sick and tired of Gnome automount issues

haarp · Guru Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 535

Greetings.

This has been going on for a year or so now and started after a major Gnome update session. Others had similiar problems, but nothing really ever fixed it.
What is it? It's Gnome's automount that is COMPLETELY f*cked up.

Plugging in an USB stick:
- It gets mounted, and with any luck you will be greeted by a new Nautilus windows showing the contents. It will never be visible on the Desktop. With a bit of luck, it will appear under "Places" in a few hours or so.
- Nautilus offers you NO options to unmount it. Not in the file menu, not when right-clicking on the mounted-in folder. Try to unmount manually with umount /mnt/disk-1 ? Sucks for you: "/sbin/umount.hal: disk-1 is not recognized by hal"
[s]Well, use the proper umount then: /bin/umount /mnt/disk-1. That actually works and HAL notices it. GOD FORBID you unmount it from the root account! HAL does not notice that, .hal-mtab will get screwed up and it fails to remove the folder it created.[/s]
edit: looks like both are the same replaced umount commands. It takes a while until HAL "recognizes" your device. Probably the same while it takes to get it to show up under 'Places'

Having bind-mounts somewhere on your filesystem:
- Yeh, of course, you see THOSE on the Desktop. That's just what I needed! Useless clutter with no way to remove it! But under no circumstances will it show any actually useful icon for the USB stick.

Leaving the USB stick plugged in after unmountig it:
- After a few hours it will decide to mount it again. Just like that.

Internal drives show up under 'Places':
- Clicking on them will mount them and put them under .hal-mtab, but fails to register them with HAL

The are a number of threads about this already in the Gentoo Forums with a plethora of hints at how to fix this, none working. That's why I'm trying to address the whole problem in this thread here right now.

The following bugs should be fixed (by upstream):
- Integrate unmount command into Nautilus
- Fix the useless umount.hal command that takes over the old umount
- Make HAL notice when root unmounts something and update .hal-mtab accordingly and remove the old empty dir under /mnt or /media
- Show mounted devices on the Desktop
- Instantly show them under 'Places' aswell
- Do NOT show bind-mounts on the Desktop
- Don't mount previously-unmounted devices
- Fix HAL in the case of manually mounting the drive

Clad in Sky · l33t Joined: 04 May 2007 Posts: 888 Location: Germany

That sounds _really_ annoyed.
I can understand that, I was, too.
But somehow I got it fixed.
Maybe you should consider changing to xfce. Looks gnomey but seems to work without issues.
_________________
Kali Ma
Now it's autumn of the aeons
Dance with your sword
Now it's time for the harvest

jonnevers · Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 3:06 pm Post subject:

i haven't really experienced much of what you're saying but since i reinstalled i haven't really done much with removable media. i should see whats up with various types of media on a fresh ~amd64 gnome (2.24).

the one thing that gets me and i think you're mention this as two issues, i want removable media (usb drivers, cd/dvds) to show up on the desktop but i don't want ssh mounts to have icons on the desktop.

to me, these are two different types of things but nautilus treats them the same and exposes just a single option to display on desktop or not display on desktop that acts on both.

haarp · Guru Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 535

Yup, that's probably true. I am quite pissed at Gnome. And no, I'm not going to use xfce because of this

It works for you guys? What are your useflags on the gnome-packages? What hardware/gnome related daemons and services are you running?

haarp · Guru Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 535

Abraxas · l33t Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 814

Clad in Sky · l33t Joined: 04 May 2007 Posts: 888 Location: Germany

USE Flags (for your reading enjoyment):

straightlineapple · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 43

Hi,
I am having the same kind of problem here with gnome 2.22 on amd64. Some of the issues:

[*] DVDs won't mount automatically
[*] USB won't mount automatically
[*] If something is on the cd drive when the computer starts, it won't get mounted either
[*] Mounting things with the Disk Mounter doesn't make them appear on the desktop
[*] Nautilus can't mount anything when one clicks over its icon on "Computer"

It would be nice if someone posted here all the partial solutions that have been proposed so far on other topics, it would really help a lot!

Thanks

gemini91 · Guru Joined: 27 Nov 2003 Posts: 317 Location: Naples, Fl

usb memory sticks mount fine, and umount OK. dvd's and cd's also mount
and unmount with out any problems. I run ~amd64, Gnome-2.24.2 and
hal is :

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild R ] sys-apps/hal-0.5.11-r6 USE="X acpi laptop -apm -crypt -debug -dell -disk-partition -doc (-selinux)" 0 kB

The only thing I know that is different is that I prefer to have the other partitions on my machine mount
automatically, and apparently that is not how hal works. So I delete the following file to make that happen.

/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/99-storage-policy-fixed-drives.fdi

Apparently that does not work for everyone, but after every hal update I delete it and my partitions mount.

haarp · Guru Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 535

Heh. Tried updating Gnome to no avail.

Automount even interferes with Gparted. Everytime it does something, the drives get reinitialized and the automounter starts mounting all the internal and external things he can get his ugly hands on... It is impossible to use gparted in this state, except when disabling HAL completely (which gparted depends upon or it won't start!)

haarp · Guru Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 535

Major breakthrough!

No fancy hal-rule-editing was necessary. I have gnome-volume-manager -with- the automount useflag installed.
I long had a symlink from /media pointing to /mnt, cause I didn't accept the fact that someone was to decide where I mount my stuff. I finally gave up on that and made /media an extra folder. The results are impressive:

- Nautilus recognizes drives instantly and correctly
- Nautilus offers an 'unmount' option
- The drive shows up on the desktop
- hal.mtab gets updated properly and the folder gets removed when it is no longer needed

As for removable drives like floppies or cdroms: Remove their /etc/fstab entries. Then they will integrate with Nautilus and HAL and work properly, show unmount buttons, etc.
So I guess the whole thing was my fault all along.

These problems remain:
- bind/ssh-mounts and a few others remain on the Desktop, although unneeded and they can't be removed individually. -> Get rid of them
- Don't mount EVERYthing you can get your hands on and that is not in the fstab!
- I would like persistent mounts in the fstab to be recognized and more nicely integrated into Gnome
I haven't tested how HAL/Gnome handles manual unmounting by root yet.

Clad in Sky · l33t Joined: 04 May 2007 Posts: 888 Location: Germany

Congratulations!

timeBandit · Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2009 4:53 pm Post subject:

letrec_ · n00b Joined: 06 Jul 2009 Posts: 2

Is there a solution for the Gnome hal automount issue? I am experiencing similar problems on amd64 after an upgrade to GNOME 2.24.3 with hal-0.5.11