pmount-gui + *kit free system [lxde kde ...]

Message

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Fri Oct 05, 2012 6:04 pm

You like simple but efficient wm/de. You will like pmount-gui.

pmount is a policy based mounter that gives the ability to mount removable devices as a user. pmount-gui is a simple graphical frontend for pmount by Mikko Rasa.

I made a bug report where you can find 2 ebuilds, a live one, and the other for a tarball from today.

To emerge pmount-gui will install pmount. The other depends are udev and gtk+:2.

With "pmount-gui", you will get a gtk2 window where you can select the drive to mount with pmount.
With "pmount-gui -u", you will get a gtk2 window where you can select the drive to unmount.

This is a very useful program for all of us that doesn't want bloated stuffs like *kit lying around in their systems. It took me 2 minutes to associate it with 2 button bindings in fvwm-crystal. 2 keyboard bindings will be as easy to implement.

You can use it in conjunction with uam. uam is better for removable medias like CDROM and DVD, because it just mount them in the background.

With pmount-gui, we get the possibility to mount and unmount the other removable medias with 2 key press or 2 mouse clicks.

At that time, pmount work with all kind of removable medias, but pmount-gui work only with the usb ones. I contacted the author about this, and he is certainly open to improving the program.

Edit 1: As stated lower, pmount-gui is working fine now with external firewire devices.

Edit 2: For an *kit free lxde, see lower.

Edit 3: For an *kit and semantic-desktop free kde, see lower.

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Sat Oct 06, 2012 10:25 am

The GIT repo have been updated. pmount-gui support both usb and firewire devices.

krinn · Post by **krinn** » Sat Oct 06, 2012 7:14 pm

thank you for sharing a *kit free solution

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Sun Oct 14, 2012 10:07 am

It is gigolo also that is good. It use GVfs, so it can do more, but it is slower. It also have a more advanced GUI with preferences setting and so on.

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Mon Oct 15, 2012 4:10 pm

A little update. In portage, lxde depend on udisks, but not in the lxde wiki.

In consequence, I made a bug report where you can find 2 patches. They add an udisks USE flag into lxde-base/lxsession and x11-libs/libfm. That is all that is needed to install an *kit free lxde

: lxde-base/lxsession and x11-libs/libfm should depend conditionally on udisks

Also, if lxde doesn't start or doesn't show up for you, change the permission of its session file in /etc/X11/Sessions to 0755. This have already been signalled in bugzilla.

EDIT: To resume, a patch that add an upower USE flag in xsession-0.4.6.1 is available on bug 438478, and a patch that add an udisks USE flag is on bug438700.

boozo · Post by **boozo** » Sat Oct 20, 2012 7:51 pm

Rhâa lovely ! no more *-kit packages

Many thanks for your 2 patch on b.g.o., it works fine here

(et vais tester pmount-gui tant qu'a être dans l'euphorie du moment)

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Sun Oct 21, 2012 9:39 pm

Another update. According to an email by Duncan on the gentoo-desktop email list, it is possible to get a *kit free kde. A very interesting and not surprising side effect is that it will be much faster.

Get ride of *kit:

Code: Select all

-consolekit -policykit -udisks -udisks2 -upower

and get ride of semantic-desktop:

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-raptor -redland -semantic-desktop -virtuoso

(Of course that means no kdepim packages at all. I got fed up with akonadi problems and switched to the gtk-based claws-mail after nearly a decade on kmail! That allowed me to kill kmail and akonadi, which allowed me to kill semantic-desktop for all of kde, which allowed me to kill rasqal, redland, virtuoso, soprano... I did it mainly to get rid of akonadi and the problems it brought, but WOW, the kde4 desktop was faster without all that extra bloatware!

And I had already turned off nepomuk and strigi too, and it was STILL dramatically faster when kde was built without that junk! Sort of reminds me of all those MSWormOS users and how surprised they often are to learn how badly the malware was affecting system performance once it's cleaned up. Yes, I DID just compare the semantic-desktop crap to malware!)

Hypnos · Post by **Hypnos** » Fri Oct 26, 2012 5:58 pm

FWIW, I've succeeded in ripping out ConsoleKit and polkit from my XFCE. My method:

* Set general USE flags "-consolekit -policykit" and for xfce4-session specifically "-udev"

* Use xfce4-battery-plugin to give battery status instead of xfce4-power-manager

* Have my special keys mapped to "sudo pm-hibernate" and "sudo pm-suspend" for those functions

* Use pmount + pmount-gui to mount/umount USB sticks instead of thunar-volman

Honestly, if sudo does the job for you (which it likely can, see "man sudoers") the *kit bloat is completely unnecessary.

When systemd tries to infect the world in earnest I'll move over to the udev fork

gkmac · Post by **gkmac** » Sun Oct 28, 2012 4:43 pm

On my install, it doesn't appear to be possible (as an example) to unset the policykit USE flag...

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# emerge -pv kdelibs
[ebuild   R    ] kde-base/kdelibs-4.8.5:4  USE="3dnow alsa bzip2 handbook mmx nls opengl (policykit) semantic-desktop spell sse sse2 ssl udev udisks upower -acl (-altivec) (-aqua) -debug -doc -fam -jpeg2k -kerberos -lzma -openexr {-test} (-upnp) -zeroconf" 11,920 kB
# USE="-policykit" emerge -pv kdelibs
[ebuild   R    ] kde-base/kdelibs-4.8.5:4  USE="3dnow alsa bzip2 handbook mmx nls opengl (policykit) semantic-desktop spell sse sse2 ssl udev udisks upower -acl (-altivec) (-aqua) -debug -doc -fam -jpeg2k -kerberos -lzma -openexr {-test} (-upnp) -zeroconf" 11,920 kB

Putting -policykit into /etc/make.conf has no effect, policykit still stubbornly shows up as red and enabled.

Am I missing something?

ppurka · Post by **ppurka** » Sun Oct 28, 2012 5:19 pm

Probably you need to force disable the USE flag. So you will need to create a /etc/portage/profile/use.force with the lines

Code: Select all

-consolekit
-policykit

and also add these flags to make.conf. See "man portage" for a description of use.force.

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Sun Oct 28, 2012 5:56 pm

You have USE="upower udisks", and both depend on polkit. This is why to put USE="-polkit" alone will not work.

Code: Select all

# emerge -vp kdelibs

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild   R    ] kde-base/kdelibs-4.9.2:4  USE="3dnow acl alsa bzip2 fam handbook jpeg2k mmx nls openexr opengl spell sse sse2 ssl udev zeroconf (-altivec) (-aqua) -debug -doc -kerberos -lzma -policykit -semantic-desktop {-test} -udisks (-udisks2) (-upnp) -upower" 0 kB

In that case, you should at least have USE="-policykit -udisks (-udisks2) -upower". Be also aware that console kit will force polkit, so USE="-consolekit" is good to have in all cases.

The Doctor · Post by **The Doctor** » Sun Oct 28, 2012 10:10 pm

The desktop-kde profile forces policykit and consolekit otherwise kde is not supported by upstream.

see ppurka's post for solution. I have had absolutely no problems with a *kit free kde for at least a year.

steveL · Post by **steveL** » Mon Nov 26, 2012 12:15 am

The Doctor wrote:The desktop-kde profile forces policykit and consolekit otherwise kde is not supported by upstream.

see ppurka's post for solution. I have had absolutely no problems with a *kit free kde for at least a year.

WOOT!! I finally got rid of that crap :-) Reading your post made me think it might be worth trying, not just possible, so thanks.

I had to remove k3b first, which was a shame, but then I haven't used it for ages, and I'll sort something out with the command-line utils when I need to. I'd already got rid of semantic-craptop: I'm happily using mutt now which is lovely and fast, and even easier to use than pine was ;) It took me a while as I had to set up procmail (which I'm very glad I did) and multiple accounts. I've [topic=945868]written up a How-To[/topic] as I had to adapt stuff I found on the mutt wiki to the newer version of getmail. I'm so glad that I didn't give up on the idea of using Maildir, and I find it amazing that none of the gui clients besides Kmail supports it (Thunderbird has a bastardized variant, but doesn't support standard Maildir. Apparently Balsa does, but it has a load of Gnome deps, which is even worse for our use-case.)

I thought I'd need to integrate notmuch into mutt, as I have quite a lot of mail going back years. But with the qdbm backend, it's pretty quick, so I'll do that when I get some spare time and feel like it :)

Thanks again to all of you for the info in this post.

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Sun Jan 13, 2013 4:29 am

A little update. I would not use such a setup with lxde unfortunately. I guess the rule to adopt is: If you get your way with portage, your favourite WM-desktop will work fine.

I put 2 desktop profiles based on that thread into the pro-audio overlay (available with layman) . One for kde, the second for the other WMs. (Be aware: they also contain a lot of audio related USE flags

)

soka · Post by **soka** » Sun Jan 13, 2013 4:39 pm

Here is how to get a *kit free gnome-2.32.1 desktop.

[*]Set in make.conf USE="-consolekit -policykit -udisks".

[*]Update packages to the new use flags.

[*]After that the only packages remaining with direct dependencies to polkit are udisks and upower.

[*]To get rid of udisks you have dispose of libgdu which is a dependency for gvfs[gdu] which is a dependency for gnome so you have to modify the gnome ebuild.

[*]After that re emerge gvfs and gnome.

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echo "gnome-base/gvfs -gdu" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge -va1 gvfs
emerge -va1 gnome

[*]To get rid of upower you have to patch gnome-session because upower is a compile dependency. In the patch I removed the dependency and replaced the functions calls for suspend and hibernate in the logout dialog with calls to sudo pm-suspend and sudo pm-hibernate.

[*]Finally

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emerge -C polkit consolekit udisks upower libgdu

gnome-session-2.32.1-upower.patch

gnome-session-2.32.1-r3.ebuild

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Mon Jan 14, 2013 8:46 am

soka wrote:Here is how to get a *kit free gnome-2.32.1 desktop.
<snip>

Thank you soka.

It is certainly folks using gnome they will be interested by your work.

Do you have considered to contribute your patch and ebuild to some overlay?

I ask this because, even if I can make ebuild and shell scripts, I am not a programmer, and is a little bit reticent to add it into the pro-audio overlay if I cannot maintain it myself.

EDIT: I will not incorporate it into the pro-audio overlay because many of its user are using ~arch in make.conf. I try to install your ebuild, it work, but as soon than you want to install another gnome2 package, it is a real dependency hell on ~arch for many of them. Also, I don't have any interest in Gnome because of its so insanely simplistic focus policy. I consider it to be completely broken. Just because of that I never used gnome more than a few minutes. So I am not a good gnome tester

soka · Post by **soka** » Mon Jan 14, 2013 2:51 pm

For those interested you can get the gnome-session ebuild along the other modified gnome ebuilds from the overlay I use for my machines. http://k6.tuxhome.com.ar/svn/overlay/
Note that the gnome ebuild is a stripped down version(no evolution, epiphany, sound juicer, vinagre, vino, sea horse, bug-buddy, cheese and other apps I don't use nor want).
For use it with layman you have to add it to layman.cfg in the overlay list part.

Code: Select all

nano -w /etc/layman/layman.cfg
overlays  : http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/overlays/repositories.xml
            http://k6.tuxhome.com.ar/repositories.xml

After that

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layman -S
layman -a soka

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Wed Jan 16, 2013 9:36 pm

soka wrote:For those interested you can get the gnome-session ebuild along the other modified gnome ebuilds from the overlay I use for my machines. http://k6.tuxhome.com.ar/svn/overlay/

Thank you soka.

I added a few words about your overlay into the pro-audio wiki.

Also, it is some background informations for the curious here.

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Thu Jan 17, 2013 10:07 pm

When using an ~arch installation, you can find a package.mask file to use with soka's overlay here. It will mask Gnome3. It is from GNOME 3.2 in Gentoo: answers to common general questions.

theBlackDragon · Post by **theBlackDragon** » Mon Jan 21, 2013 10:30 pm

soka wrote:For those interested you can get the gnome-session ebuild along the other modified gnome ebuilds from the overlay I use for my machines. http://k6.tuxhome.com.ar/svn/overlay/
Note that the gnome ebuild is a stripped down version(no evolution, epiphany, sound juicer, vinagre, vino, sea horse, bug-buddy, cheese and other apps I don't use nor want).
For use it with layman you have to add it to layman.cfg in the overlay list part.
Code: Select all
nano -w /etc/layman/layman.cfg
overlays  : http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/overlays/repositories.xml
            http://k6.tuxhome.com.ar/repositories.xml
After that
Code: Select all
layman -S
layman -a soka

Just fyi, it might be easier to base your ebuild off of the gnome-light one and then install the rest of the stuff you need by hand rather than removing all the crud from the "full" Gnome ebuild.

You should also probably prepare for the day when building Gnome without all the *kit/systemd/pulsaudio junk becomes plain impossible. The Gnome devs seem entirely intent on forcing their preferences on others, seemingly down to kernel level if given the chance.

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Tue Jan 22, 2013 10:44 pm

theBlackDragon wrote:You should also probably prepare for the day when building Gnome without all the *kit/systemd/pulsaudio junk becomes plain impossible. The Gnome devs seem entirely intent on forcing their preferences on others, seemingly down to kernel level if given the chance.

Be also prepared for the day Gnome will force us with a descent mouse focus policy

More seriously, is it me that is foolish, or are Red Hat developers deeply involved with all that crap? At the point they are, the best thing that can append is them making their own Gnome OS instead of forcing junkwarez.tm stuffs in GNU/Linux.

I try Red Hat / Fedora several times in the past, that on several machines on which other linux distributions was working without problem. The only time the installation did succeed

, the result was a kernel panic at boot

So maybe the whole point for all that crap, is to circumvent their own incapacity to learn how to make an installable and usable linux system.

curmudgeon · Post by **curmudgeon** » Sun Jun 16, 2013 5:21 am

Dominique_71 wrote:A little update. I would not use such a setup with lxde unfortunately. I guess the rule to adopt is: If you get your way with portage, your favourite WM-desktop will work fine.

Great thread, but I am wondering why you wouldn't use it on lxde. I have one machine with lxde, mostly as a test (getting prepared for the day when kde becomes completely unusable), and would just like to know why you think it doesn't work well.

Dominique_71 · Post by **Dominique_71** » Sun Jun 16, 2013 11:36 am

It is 2 bugs about that: 438478 and 438700.

According to 438700, pcmanfm exhibit crashes. Of course, you will be fine using another file manager.

As you can see with my signature, my favourite desktop is FVWM-Crystal. It know have a native desktop manager (icons on the desktop) which support $HOME, the XDG user directories and the mounted partitions. You can choose which group of icons you want, and which actions are bind to these icons. It support any file manager for X or the console, and even custom commands. The icon's are from Ken's dual png icons, and it was possible to port the 2 pictures of them to fvwm.

An updated FVWM-Crystal ebuild can be find on bug 468680, and a live ebuild into the proaudio overlay.

Hypnos · Post by **Hypnos** » Sun Jun 16, 2013 12:09 pm

FYI, I'm enjoying using udevil with the stripped-down XFCE desktop I describe earlier in my thread.

Here's a script for throwing up desktop notifications using xfce4-notifyd whenever udevil does something (see udevil config file):

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#!/bin/sh

export DISPLAY=":0"
export XAUTHORITY="/home/$1/.Xauthority"

ICON=/usr/share/icons/nuoveXT2/72x72/devices/drive-harddisk.png
exec /usr/bin/notify-send -u low -t 3000 "udevil" "$2" -i $ICON

You'll have to set your own icon path.

ppurka · Post by **ppurka** » Sun Jun 16, 2013 3:17 pm

+1

udevil is great. The most sane thing to come out of this udisks mess. It depends on udisks optionally, with a fallback to kernel polling if udisks is not present.

Hypnos wrote:You'll have to set your own icon path.

You don't need to. Just give the icon name without any extension or path, like this: -i drive-harddisk. It will show the icon by using your current icon theme.