# Is HAL more trouble than it's worth?



## mjkerpan (Jun 5, 2009)

I'm seriously starting to think so, at least with XFCE... GEOM creates device names that make mounting removable media from the command line quite simple. HAL, even using the configuration from PC-BSD seems unable to mount most of the stuff I attach to my computer (maybe one out of every five USB mass storage devices or memory cards in my card reader get properly found and mounted)

I'll try KDE (which is no doubt a bit more robust in it's HAL support than XFCE), but if things don't improve, it's back to the shell for my mounting needs...


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## SirDice (Jun 5, 2009)

I haven't had any issues with anything I plugged into my machine.

My xorg.conf doesn't have a keyboard or mouse section, hal picks it up. My USB sticks, drives and what not are all neatly auto-mounted. 

In short, hal has been working as it should.

How up to date is your hal? Did you follow the hal faq? Did you install thunar-volman-plugin?


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## roddierod (Jun 5, 2009)

There may be something different with XFCE. I use Thunar as a file manager sometimes and when it is open and I plug my MP3 player into the USB port 10 more instances of Thunar pop up. I have no idea why. 

Other times it just doesn't show up. I never really bothered to look into it, as most of the time I use MC anyway.


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## mjkerpan (Jun 5, 2009)

roddierod said:
			
		

> There may be something different with XFCE. I use Thunar as a file manager sometimes and when it is open and I plug my MP3 player into the USB port 10 more instances of Thunar pop up. I have no idea why.


I've had all those problems...


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## SirDice (Jun 5, 2009)

I have all that auto-run, auto-open etc. turned off. It only auto-mounts. Haven't had any issues so far.


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## roddierod (Jun 5, 2009)

I'll check when I get home, but I didn't set it to auto-open or anything like that. 

Am using Thunar with Openbox. I don't have any of the other XFCE stuff installed - other than what it required by Thunar.


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## roddierod (Jun 5, 2009)

Just check. I only have auto-mount enabled, nothing else.


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## Beastie (Jun 6, 2009)

mjkerpan, do you have the usual removable drives (fd, cd) icons on your Xfce desktop? What happens when you double-click on them? Does it give you a HAL error or what? Did you edit your /usr/local/etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf and add the proper actions for your user? Also, I'm not 100% sure, but you may have to belong to the operator group.


I managed to make HAL work on one of my computers. But I stopped using it for mounting because it occasionally caused core dumps in different components (the exo library, desktop, etc.) and volman even used to crash the entire system.
Plus for some reason HAL doesn't like my CD drive and spits errors every second, thus rendering tty0 unusable.

So now, I'm back at mounting drives manually and I only use HAL for reboot/shutdown.
I will survive.


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## mjkerpan (Jun 8, 2009)

Right now, it's not anything, my power supply died on my FreeBSD box, leaving me to operate on borrowed hardware only until I can get a new one. I copied my PolicyKit.conf from one somebody had posted that originates in PC-BSD and allows all users to mount and unmount removable media, though, but I never got any drive icons on my desk. In the end, I just gave up and configured my system to allow "traditional" user mounting and set up a devfs configuration that lets all members of "wheel" of which my user account and root are the sole members have full access to /dev/acd*, /dev/da* and /dev/msdosfs/* It works much better and is what my system will stay with after it comes back online.


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## allbanddxer (Jun 12, 2009)

" Originally Posted by roddierod  View Post
There may be something different with XFCE. I use Thunar as a file manager sometimes and when it is open and I plug my MP3 player into the USB port 10 more instances of Thunar pop up. I have no idea why. "


I just wanted to add that I am seeing this on my system (7.2, openbox & thunar) as well... any ideas?


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## allbanddxer (Jun 12, 2009)

allbanddxer said:
			
		

> " Originally Posted by roddierod  View Post
> There may be something different with XFCE. I use Thunar as a file manager sometimes and when it is open and I plug my MP3 player into the USB port 10 more instances of Thunar pop up. I have no idea why. "
> 
> 
> I just wanted to add that I am seeing this on my system (7.2, openbox & thunar) as well... any ideas?



Ok, I think I solved this problem... Maybe this will work for you as well, just remove the thunar-volman-plugin. As far as i can tell everything is working well without it, and the multiple new thunar windows that were opening have stopped occurring on initial mounting of a storage device.


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## DutchDaemon (Jun 12, 2009)

On 7.2-STABLE, XFCE and the Thunar plugin, the multiple window thingy does not happen to me. It just opens one instance.


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## allbanddxer (Jun 12, 2009)

DutchDaemon said:
			
		

> On 7.2-STABLE, XFCE and the Thunar plugin, the multiple window thingy does not happen to me. It just opens one instance.



Maybe I should upgrade from 7.2-RELEASE to 7.2-STABLE


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## roddierod (Jun 12, 2009)

Just checked as I'm using 7.2 STABLE also and it doesn't do the mulitple window thing anymore. It did do it a few weeks ago so one of the latest update must have fixed that.


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