2006-09-29
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).