automounting in XFCE 4.8 under Fedora 16

[Peter Frederick Patel-Schneider]

I have problems with auotmounting in XFCE 4.8 under Fedora 16.  I think
that I have diagnosed part of this problem.


When XFCE starts, Thunar is not automatically started.  Therefore there
is nothing to handle the mounting part of plugging in a new volume.
When Thunar is running this mounting does happen, at least for USB
devices.

There are lots of ways to start Thunar.  Some of them start Thunar as a
daemon and some of them don't.  The problem with starting Thunar as a
non-daemon is that Thunar will probably eventually go away, and then
automounting will no longer work.

It thus appears to me that XFCE should start up Thunar as a daemon
during startup.  This should happen before any connected external
storage devices are recognized, so that volumes in them can be mounted.

How can this be arranged?  Should this be escalted up to a general XFCE
forum, or is this specific to XFCE under Fedora?


The other part of my automounting problem appears to be that Thunar
doesn't have the same notion of removable drives as does the XFCE
desktop manager.  I have an external IDE disk.  When this disk is
plugged in (albeit in a slightly unusual way, as the disk is in a
removable disk tray in the CD slot of a Thinkpad), the XFCE desktop
correctly shows an icon for it and labels it as a removable volume.
However, this volume is not automounted, even when Thunar is running.

How can Thunar be coerced to automount this volume?


Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research