Re: XFCE--can't mount USB devices
On 10/12/2011 05:53 AM, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
I'm running XFCE 4.8 on Debian Testing, with everything up to date; I'm
using xdm as my display manager. Any attempt by a non-root user to mount
a USB device in Thunar fails with the message "Mount Failed: Failed to
mount "[device]" Not Authorized". I do have Thunar set to mount
removable media automatically.
This seems to have been a problem from the start of 4.8; there's quite a
bit of discussion of this for Arch Linux and Slackware, but I can't find
anything useful for Debian. It seems to be an issue with ConsoleKit, but
the solutions for Arch don't really apply for Debian as the setup is
different. There was a discussion of this in the Debian forum when 4.8
came out at http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=63088&start=60
but there was no clean answer.
I hesitate to suggest this, but using the LightDM package in place of
XDM fixes these ConsoleKit issues. But when I say "fixes" I speak with a
certain trepidation.
I have been bouncing back and forth between XDM and LightDM on my Debian
testing systems for months now. Every time I use LightDM I get bitten by
some new bug. The worst two problems I've seen are:
1. When I first tried it (LightDM) I saw huge ~/.xsession-errors files
on systems running AMD64 kernel with eventual hard lock of the system
and a subsequent inability to log back on to the user profile. (Note:
There was really nothing wrong with the user profile per se. I could get
onto it with startx or by installing a different DM. This problem
appears to have been fixed via upgrades over the past few weeks. But I
went through several cycles of LightDM installation / purging before I
saw this issue go away.)
2. Just recently I have seen constant high CPU use by the lightdm
process on some machines running the i386 kernel.
But having LightDM installed does make Thunar work for mounting volumes,
and...
A related problem is that I am not able to restart or shut down using
the graphical tools; here's a recent discussion of this on the XFCE
forum from a Debian Testing user:
http://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=6343 This also seems to depend on
a ConsoleKit permissions issue. I don't particularly care about this
myself, as it's easy enough to do this from the commandline; I'm
mentioning it only as a parallel.
...it makes the logout / shut down / reboot / hibernate / suspend
choices work on the logout dialog. It also makes all of the Xfce4 power
manager stuff work.
I'd be grateful for any suggestions. This does seriously affect the
usability of the system, and it's getting very frustrating; I'd think
that the ability of a regular user to hotplug removable media should be
an important thing to have working.
For now I'm sticking with XDM. I put a file in /etc/sudoers.d to give my
users permission to use poweroff and reboot (I created launchers for
those who didn't want to use the xfrun4 dialog), and I show them how to
use pmount for command line control of volume mounting.
LightDM is at version 0.9.7 in the testing main repo (the only repo I
use). I've been following the distro-pkg-dev@open.jdk.net list to try to
decide when to try LightDM again. I think, from what I've seen so far,
that I'll wait until 1.0.2 or 1.0.3.
GDM3 just isn't a reasonable solution for Xfce users because it insists
on installing the entire Gnome power management scheme, with somewhat
unpredictable results on system behavior -- at least on the test system
I used for looking at it.
I hope that's helpful.
Regards,
Gilbert
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