Knowledge Base

Introduction

When I read DistroWatch a few weeks ago about Project Trident making it easier to access removable media, I was intrigued. And when I clicked through and read the announcement from Project Trident directly, it was even more fascinating! In the past, on the Devuan mailing lists and irc channels, I have seen references to some community members' projects for auto-mounting removable media. I had never investigated them though. But this news article from a fascinating distro inspired me to dig around to find their implementation. I finally found it.

Discussion about trident-automount

The utility is written in Go. I have nothing specifically against Go, but I don't feel like trying to find a compiler and learning how to package up Go applications. But the utility is simple enough that I was able to read it. Additionally, I felt that due to its wrapping around udevadm monitor , that it wasn't doing anything that could not be done in shell. So I wrote my own version! But more on that in a minute. The trident-automount utility creates xdg-style .desktop file for each "added" (discovered) attached block device. These .desktop files are placed presumably somewhere the Lumina desktop environment reads some of its menu entries.

Translating to my own implementation

I started off with an almost line-for-line translation to shell+coreutils. Watch the output of udevadm monitor, and generate .desktop files.

Adding extra bits

I decided that it wasn't enough to add .desktop files; I wanted to re- implement the old-school non-free-OS removable media tray icon. I want to see a little icon appear when a flash drive is plugged in, and that icon provides a menu. Now, due to how autofs works especially with the short time-out as established by the trident-automount example, I don't need dedicated buttons to umount anything. So my myautomount-trayicon menu entries will execute the xdg "Exec=" field, which is normally going to be the "xdg-open /browse/sdb2." So yes, it relies on you having definitions for xdg-open to open your preferred file manager. I use xfe and sometimes Thunar (from Xfce). And then I decided that I didn't want to depend on GtkStatusIcon which has been "deprecated" for probably a decade by now. So I added to the trayicon python program the ability to use the XApp library! I added a boolean to the script which the admin can set. I did not yet make this a tunable in the makefile. I need to work on that.

Putting it all together

So now, my OBS space has a package you can install in Debian-family distros, including Devuan GNU+Linux! Myautomount does not depend on dbus or systemd. It relies on python3, autofs, and sudo. Go check it out! Or you can use the source code for whatever you want.