Gnome daemons you'll want to run in a custom environment

As a followup to an an earlier entry, here's what I've worked out about how to use the standard Gnome automount and other stuff in your own custom environment. All of this is based on Fedora Core 5, but I think it's probably generic to any modern Gnome-based system.

The Gnome automount stuff is done by gnome-volume-manager, which runs as the user and communicates with the system HAL daemon to do all the actual work. This just mounts things when they're recognized; to unmount them, you need to use gnome-umount or gnome-eject. To tell them what to work on, use '-d <device>' or the '-p' option, which takes a variety of forms; to quote the --help text:

Mount by one of device's nicknames: mountpoint, label, with or without directory prefix

To remount a device after you have unmounted it and fiddled with it, use 'gnome-mount -d <device>'.

The behavior of the volume manager is configured with the gnome-volume-properties program, which you can run without being in Gnome. By default, the volume manager will pop up a Nautilus window browsing the newly inserted volume; you probably want to turn this off. (I also turn off auto-playing newly inserted audio CDs and video DVDs.)

The other Gnome daemon that I found I really wanted to run in my custom environment is esd, the Gnome sound daemon. Otherwise Flash stuff in my browser often failed to have audio (although some will consider this a feature).