Thunar does not show usb thumbdrives or external drives.

JustAnother · Apprentice Joined: 23 Sep 2016 Posts: 186

I'm building an amd64 gentoo installation. Many small issues, but there is a biggie.

I installed xfce4 and thunar. They seemed to work. But when I put in a usb thumbdrive or external drive, nothing shows up under DEVICES.

-> My account is a member of cdrom cdrw usb wheel, etc.

-> I installed gvfs, xfce4-volman, but not gvfs-acl.

-> I rebooted.

-> The drives come and go from lsblk when plugged/unplugged.

-> I enabled volume management in thunar/advanced settings.

-> I ran startxfce4 from the root account with the same problem.

-> Thunar docs say the device will always show up as a DEVICE at the very least.

-> X is giving errors like: GVFS-RemoteVolumeMonitor warning dbus org.gtk.vfs.UDISK2VolumeMonitor is not supported.

-> There is surprisingly little coherent information about this scattered about. A lot of do this-do that advice, but nothing works for me.

Does anybody have any ideas here?

Thanks

JustAnother · Apprentice Joined: 23 Sep 2016 Posts: 186

I left out an important detail.

-> The same thing happens if thunar doesn't seem to be running. I'm talking about the drive icons on the desktop. I didn't think to check there before. I don't know if this makes it an xfce issue or a thunar issue.

eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Aug 06, 2017 3:23 am Post subject:

Comment: If you're trying to avoid the usual seat mechanism and going for straight unixisms, these will not work properly (and the groups/chmods should not matter as they're deeply embedded in udisks if you want automounting). The default is to use udisks(and therefore dbus) to mount disks, coupled with consolekit (or systemd) and policykit.

Lots of questions beyond the above:

What is your make.profile linked to (and/or
$ emerge --info
)?

Are you using systemd/consolekit or not? If so, are you getting a session:

systemd (honestly, if you built with systemd, it should just "work" as if you have USE=systemd your login will automatically get updated for a session):
$ loginctl

or

consolekit:
$ ck-list-sessions

If you're not getting a session with consolekit you'll need to make sure you get one. Either use a display manager that supports consolekit or get a session before starting xfce -
$ startxfce4 --with-ck-launch

---

Also, make sure your drives do NOT show up in /etc/fstab. Udisks will not handle drives there.
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JustAnother · Apprentice Joined: 23 Sep 2016 Posts: 186

Thanks for your quick response. I want to read up on some of the things you mentioned before going any further. I'll get on it tomorrow.

-> I'm not running systemd. Just OpenRc.

-> My profile is amd64 desktop.

By the way, systemd is the best selling point for Gentoo. As in no systemd.

eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Aug 06, 2017 8:21 pm Post subject:

Oops. mentioned "your drives" - but I meant "your removable drives" ...

Since you didn't mention what console session you were using and the fact that most DE's depend on it now, I had to ask, as it's necessary most of the times now for DE mounting (i.e. click to mount). The "old fashioned" way has gone by the wayside and just wanted to make sure you're not expecting it to work without at least consolekit/udisks/dbus - you're on your own there. As you're using the desktop profile, you should be using Consolekit and suspect that getting a session may be your problem if you're just startx'ing into your GUI. But it won't work if you have your removable media /dev/sdXXX in /etc/fstab as user mount or whatnot.

I have both xfce4 on systemd and openrc machines, they work fine, disks show up in Thunar and the desktop - but I am using a display manager (gdm for the systemd boxes, lightdm for the openrc boxes.
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JustAnother · Apprentice Joined: 23 Sep 2016 Posts: 186

I have sys-fs/udev installed, also sys-fs/eudev.

I have udisks, consolekit, and dbus installed.

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2017 4:56 pm Post subject:

Your system dbus (started by root) isn't running (you don't want a regular user fscking with dbus, need a root-owned dbus.) The consolekit service will start dbus for you as well as start the console-kit-daemon.

# rc-update add consolekit default
# service consolekit start # if no reboot

You won't need to do this if you use openrc xdm, which will call consolekit for you.
_________________
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What am I supposed watching?

JustAnother · Apprentice Joined: 23 Sep 2016 Posts: 186

Yep - consolekit was not running as a service. I fixed that.

-> How did that sneak past me during the installation? I would have thought that the desktop install would have set up consolekit.

I ran ck-list-sessions from within xfce4, but there was no output. My other Gentoo machine (laptop) does have output. So I restarted xfce using "startxfce4 --with-ck-launch" and ck-list-sessions did show output, and the usb drive showed up, and I could mount it with a mouse click.

-> Why do I have to use --with-ck-launch? On the other Gentoo machine, I don't need to. I'm still doing something wrong.

Also, I have /etc/fstab entries for another partition on my main disk. It showed up before on the desktop & thunar, but now it is gone as you said it would be.

-> Is there a simple way to bring it back? It still shows up in lsblk.

Thanks. What I'm thinking here is that somebody should write a procedure that takes someone on a grand tour of xfce, sniffing out all these details about dbus, consolekit, automounting/permissions, etc. This is a good way to unbreak a broken DE while learning the system. There are a lot of unhappy people out there who keep bumping up against these issues.

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2017 9:48 pm Post subject:

I don't think by default any emerge will automatically add rc services ... with good reason. I would hope anything that's automatically started should be controlled by the person installing. Same goes for

emerge openssh

or

emerge mysql

Both of these have services involved that though maybe at first glance would be helpful if they were automatically started, may actually have some configuration involved before they should be started.

--

Now the other issue is that I don't know how your other machine is setup. If you have a graphical login, most of these have consolekit support built-in and thus will give you a consolekit session immediately.

It seems pam now has support for sessions, so perhaps you have outstanding updates in /etc/pam.d that etc-update or dispatch-conf needs cleanup? Perhaps after that you won't need --with-ck-launch further.

--

You should have /etc/fstab entries only for disks that should be statically available and should not be messed with by a user. Note too that disks mounted by the user may not have all the usual permissions as these disks should not be normally be "trusted".

So yes you should put /etc/fstab entries for any disks that:

1. Everyone should always be able to see at all times, mounted on bootup, and thus not need click to mount (normal mounts like / (root) filesystem)
2. Nobody should be able to see, just have an entry and stick in "noauto" in the flags.

Else it should be fine just to leave out all other entries, you'll see the unmounted disks in your GUI, and you can mount them as needed.
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?