One computer, three Mandriva installations

[Eggdog]

After some problematical experiences in the fall involving (a.) the rapid changes and improvements in the Linux operating system, and (b.) some aging hardware that for various reason$$$ I'm not in a position to replace, I called a halt to my distro-hopping days. Yes, I still have a highly experimental installation of Arch on the oldest beater in the house, to prove that I can have a more or less functioning system with just tty, ncurses, and Xterm. I'm a more or less functioning kind of guy, so that's been a rewarding exercise and one I'll return to soon. But my other machines run the stable, reliable Mandriva 2010, Gnome edition. I'm a responsible citizen now.So last night I carved out a couple of partitions and installed:Mandriva 2010, KDE4 edition.Mandriva 2010, XFCE edition.How boring is that??? That is soooooo borrrring!!! But you might be wondering, "I didn't even know Mandriva had an XFCE edition." They don't. It's a community project^[1]. Mandriva doesn't endorse it, but they don't deny it, either; it even has a proud page on the Mandriva wiki.Installation of the XFCE edition was, if anything, faster than that of the other two. The .iso isn't that much smaller, but for some reason it installed itself in no time. And it was easy peasy, requiring very little intelligent input from yours truly. (I did have to wake up long enough to tell Grub to go park itself on sda5.)I've never had a great deal of success with XFCE, but I think some of those trials took place when I didn't have enough patience, and maybe the initial presentation wasn't the greatest. Here, I've had Mandriva long enough to know what I'm dealing with in some aspects. I know how to set system updates, I'm old pals with the package manager, and the goodness of MCC (Mandriva Control Center) can bail anybody out of a lot of jams. So I figured I could try XFCE again under optimal, controlled conditions.The first impression wasn't too scary. The desktop wallpaper is the familiar Mandriva lotus, and the stock programs - OpenOffice, Firefox, GIMP - were, shall we say, familiar. XFCE has been described as overlapping with Gnome, which I guess it can do, but there aren't a lot of Gnome apps here. I saw Empathy and the gThumb image viewer, but that was about it.The appearance was maybe a little off, but acting on a tip I stumbled over while looking for something else, I discovered that I should go to the Settings menu entry, choose Appearance, and in the Fonts tab, change hinting from "slight" to "full". And yeah, it really does look a bit nicer. (The menu is Mandrivized; XFCE Settings may appear elsewhere in other distros.)One thing that pleased me was that XFCE parks a clipboard application, Clipman, up on the panel. I don't often have need of a multiple-clipboard utility, but when you need one, you really need one, and it's nice to know it's there. (For inexplicable reasons, Gnome seems bound and determined to prove that Glipper never existed and never could have existed in the quantum packet that you and I, gentle reader, inhabit.)XFCE's terminal emulator has the highly unusual name of Terminal. For whatever reason, the presentation of a distro's terminal emulator makes an inordinate impression on me, and this one is a beauty. It's white on black, in a slightly larger window than is typical for Gnome presentations, and has nice large type. And the cursor is bright green. How cool is that?Emacs is the first thing I grab from the repos in any new installation, so the only thing I can tell you about the default text editor is that it's named Mousepad and is a descendant of Leafpad.XFCE's file manager, Thunar, is known for not being able to access Windows shares; it doesn't speak Samba. I got around this by editing /etc/fstab with a line that looks something like

//fileserver/eddie /home/xeddie/SMB cifs,users,noauto,noatime,username=eddie,password=motorcycleirene,workgroup=yomamalinux,ip=192.168.1.2 0 0

Now,

mount /home/xeddie/SMB

, run from the command line, will cause my Windows share to appear in Thunar, in the directory SMB.(I'm sharing my /home folder with the Gnome and KDE installations, so I'm xeddie here, and in the KDE install, which I haven't really looked at yet, I'm keddie, which sounds like a nifty utility everybody should download, n'est-ce pas?) I know that fstab is FileSystemTAB, but I read it as F-Stab and always think of Duck Stab/Buster and Glen by the Residents, one of the world's most bizarre bands. Editing fstab to enable mounting a Windows network share is one of the tricks I learned from doing that experimental Archlinux installation. It's one of those tricks that 80% of the people in the world probably know by now, but I was proud of myself for learning it so thought I'd show off a bit.Anyway, Thunar seems reasonable, though on first blush not quite as versatile as Nautilus. Some people swear by it, though, so it could easily be that I'll discover more as time goes on.I then went looking for the compose key setting. I do a fair amount of writing, and when I need an accented character, I don't want to have to click on some graphical menu. (I don't really want to take my hands off the keyboard.) In both Gnome and KDE, it is easy to assign or change the compose key. Imagine, then, my chagrin when I discovered that in XFCE, assigning a compose key requires editing xorg.conf. Now, in some of my Archlinux misadventures last fall, xorg.conf took on the role of Brutus to my Caesar, or if you prefer, it was Bob Marley and I was Sheriff Johnson. I found a "sample" xorg.conf and tried to splice it in last night, with some edits to accommodate my situation, but it didn't work. I'm quite exhausted right now (and babbling, as you might have noticed; I took Ms. Eggdog to Boston and back today, a five-hour drive in what we New Englanders like to call "weather"^[2]) and I don't have the brains to figure it out, or anything else, which is why I'm recapping my experiences rather than adding to them.Another problem has been streaming media. I'm completely in love with Webradio. In my Gnome edition, getting Live365 and Rhapsody to work was a mere matter of fetching the plugin from Adobe's Web site (Mandriva doesn't keep it in their own repo, it seems). I did that in XFCE, and complaints issued forth from within both Firefox and Opera about "an obsolete version". Again, I will endeavor to troubleshoot that when I am awake.So far, I cannot say that the XFCE version of Mandriva offers the same type of out-of-the-box ease as the Gnome version. However, I will say that it offers a lot of enjoyment on its own terms, and I respect the way that this informal team has put together a package that showcases a lot of the XFCE environment's strengths. I'll have more to say in the next couple of days, I hope.___^[1] There is an LXDE edition, too. But it says the .iso is 711 MB and can fit onto a CD-R, which doesn't make sense to me and I'm not sure it would even if it wasn't written in German. But I'll explore that later.^[2] Ms. Eggdog has an unusual medical condition that has caused her to gradually lose most of her voice over the last few years. Surgery has offered only temporary relief at traumatic cost. Dr. Franco, up at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, is trying on an experimental basis a non-surgical, temporary procedure that brings back at least some of the voice to people with this condition. So far, so good; Ms. E. was chatting away all the way back, and is now resting comfortably while I'm writing this. If we have to go to Boston to have this done every few months, that's fine.(On edit: purged stray autogenerated emoticons)

Edited March 8, 2010 by Eggdog

[securitybreach]

Nice writeup Eddie!! Also, I am glad your wife is doing better It is amazing what doctors can do nowadays.As far as the file manager, try using PCManFM http://pcmanfm.sourceforge.net/ It should be in the Mandriva repos and is a very nice file manager. I have been using it for a few years now and I love it.BTW PCManFM is the default file manager in LXDE os you have probably used it before..

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Xfce is really COOL once you learn its little quirks. Thunar has plugins that you can install, by the way... http://goodies.xfce.org/I'm currently having issues with my Mandriva/LXDE right now It's NOT behaving as I want it to. Gonna' have to get out the whip, I think. Best wishes for Mrs. Eggdog!

[zlim]

Nice write up on Mandriva XFCE; almost wants to make me take a look.One of my friends in Australia loses his voice. For at least 10 years, if not longer, he gets botox shots in his vocal chords that gives him temporary relief. Eventually, I think those will cease to do the job. I did read an article that reading poetry out loud also helps. Something about stimulating a different part of the brain, though how that relates to a problem with the vocal chords I don't know. Anything I find online I send to his wife, who has been a friend of mine for close to 40 years.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Mandriva/LXDE gave me fits last night. I may have corrupted my install. Maybe I should try the Xfce version?

[Eggdog]

Mandriva/LXDE gave me fits last night. I may have corrupted my install. Maybe I should try the Xfce version?

Maybe you should. Maybe you can succeed where I am (sob) failing -- well, not really failing, just not making a lot of progress. I'll try to get back to XFCE later on tonight....Anyway, I'm glad my adventures are entertaining at least some of you. Writing is a great stress reliever for me. Ms. Eggdog slept most of the day and woke up not being able to talk at all. The doctor says it's almost certainly a transient thing, but after we were busily chatting our little brains out for the first time in weeks or more, today's turn of events was disconcerting to say the least, especially since even though we could have probably figured it out for ourselves, nobody exactly told us to be prepared for her throat being swollen shut. (She's got a trach, so at least oxygen ain't an issue.)Liz, I've been doing some wayward research on neuroplasticity, brain retraining &c. Dr. Oliver Sacks is like my Shakespeare! Ms. E.'s been disabled for a number of years, not just with the voice thing, and tries a lot of alternative therapies to overcome her problems. Fascinating. I confess to having almost no poetic sense, but it is a different way of perceiving, and I can see how it might be helpful in some kinds of therapy.Eric, I should warn you.... I looked at the KDE edition, finally. It's pretty good. My writeup at that will come to you from....

the cloud

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Thanks for the warning.

[Eggdog]

The XFCE adventure continues.I was able, slowly and haltingly, to get Flash working: at least on the New York Times Web site, which has a fair amount of video. Rhapsody had frequent dropouts and was a challenging experience. Live365, which is generally less prima donnaish than Rhapsody, accused me of having an obsolete version of Flash. That might have been its way of telling me it couldn't find any version of Flash; sometimes it's hard to tell.I did try gnash, and I regret to say that I got nowhere with it.I posted a synopsis over on the Mandriva forums, hoping that I might catch the eye of some XFCE hacker. I was advised to remove nspluginwrapper, which is designed to help plug-ins work on non-native platforms (e.g. BSD, x86_64). And that was my ticket to ride. Everything's cool, and that's cool.The same nspluginwrapper has crashed a couple of times in my Mandriva Gnome installation: never frequently enough for me to worry about. Why it escalated from a minor annoyance to a semi-showstopper in this installation is beyond me.

-----

In part one of this epic, I presented the fstab line:

//fileserver/eddie /home/xeddie/SMB cifs,users,noauto,noatime,username=eddie,password=motorcycleirene,workgroup=yomamalinux,ip=192.168.1.2 0 0

I discovered this morning that I hadn't given myself read/write permissions and couldn't copy a file into this mountpoint. The new fstab reads:

//fileserver/eddie /home/xeddie/SMB cifs,userid=10001,rw,noauto,noatime,username=eddie,password=motorcycleirene,workgroup=yomamalinux,ip=192.168.1.2 0 0

----

On to email. Mandriva XFCE comes with Claws Mail. I set up two of my accounts yesterday. Several times, I tried to send a mail message. Several times it failed to go through and put up a message box to that effect. Several times I read the log file, and the log file said:

Error occurred while sending the message.

That's not the least helpful log file I've ever seen, but it's in the running.As it turns out, Claws (and Balsa Mail, where I first found this tip whilst researching), handle SMTP a bit differently. Evolution and Opera Mail^[1] default to utilizing port 25 for outbound mail; Comcast (our cable company) requires that we use port 587, and therefore I am used to defining my SMTP server as, e.g. smtp.eggdog.com:587. Claws actually defaults to utilizing port 587, and putting the :587 in the configuration seems to have confused it. Now, it's timing out and I still can't send anything, but I have that pleasant feeling of having made progress, no matter how illusory.I'd kind of like to get Claws to work: partly because I've never gotten it to work, not ever in my whole life, and partly because it looks kinda like an email client from 15 years ago, and I like that.Balsa receives mail just fine, but when I try to send anything out, it quietly goes into the queue, with no warning that the send failed.I've reverted to using Opera Mail, which isn't quite in the experimental spirit, but it works.

-----

XFCE doesn't actually have an in-house email client. Actually, XFCE doesn't have a lot of in-house applications compared to Gnome - never mind KDE and its Kavalry of KApps! Thunar, the file manager, is one; so is Terminal, which I was raving about in the last post. There's even a Web browser called Midori, which I'll try one of these days. There's a calendar/scheduler called Orage, which frankly looks a little generic; but I don't use applications like that very much, being more oriented towards Emacs's versatile Org-mode.

-----

XFCE has numerous system sounds. A little burst of, uh, flatulence accompanies the closing of a window. I dislike system sounds (and am perfectly capable of my own flatulence emulation!), and was pleased to find that they could be turned off under XFCE System Settings | Appearance | Settings tab | System Sounds. (I had to do a Web search for it, though, being incapable of associating "Appearance" with "System Sounds" using my own reasoning powers.)I did discover that the documentation for XFCE pertains to version 4.4. The disclaimer is presented that they don't have any documentation for version 4.6. Maybe I should help them write some documentation. Maybe I should learn what I'm doing first.

-----

I'm going to do some speed tests next.___^[1] I know Opera is a closed-source blob and is treated like a pariah amongst many Penguinist cognoscenti, but - especially since version 10.10 - it is consistently more stable & responsive than Firefox for me everywhere I've installed it. I still use Firefox for work, largely because of its neat-o word completion and the wonderful, cuddly It's All Text! extension, but I've moved over to Opera for almost everything else.The email client in Opera used to be called M2 and now is merely Opera Mail. Without a doubt, it's the easiest mail client to set up I've ever encountered. The only reason I don't use it full time is that its storage is a bit eccentric. I lost a fairly substantial archive back in my Windows days because I'd been backing up the wrong files; my fault, I know, but something about the directory structure made it a bit too easy to back up the wrong ones. The filters and folders you can see are strictly virtual; mail is stored by date and incoming account.Evolution is big and heavy, and overkill for my situation in some ways, but I have absolute faith in its archiving and searching. If XFCE ever were to become my main environment, I would install Evo, but for now I'm trying to keep this experience Gnome-free as much as possible and let XFCE sail under its own steam. I've always found configuring Thunderbird to be a dullish, turbid experience, and if I'm going to stray from my known favorites, it would be to explore the lesser-known, lightweight alternatives.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

1> I agree... blow out NDISWrapper and install Java (from Sun) and Flash (from Adobe) manually.2> Opera is on all my systems as a back up browser, usually.

[Eggdog]

2> Opera is on all my systems as a back up browser, usually.

I agree with everything you say except "usually" and "backup" :)I meant to ask you. That LXDE install that's giving you heartburn: was that the community remix, or a Mandriva Free that you customized?The nspluginwrapper is gone from Gnome, with no ill effects so far. I like it when that happens.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

It was a Mandriva Free install with LXDE instead of Gnome/KDE. It was in "Other" during the part of the install that asked what desktop you wanted to install, so yeah... probably community maintained. LXDE wasn't the issue. It was some stuff in Mandriva itself that I may have buggered up. :(I nuked the install and started fresh. I'm customizing, tweaking, updating now.

[Eggdog]

To bring the saga of XFCE on Mandriva to an end....I now have three separate and fully-functioning installations of Mandriva 2010. Fully functioning, that is, in as much as any installation can be fully functioning in the eyes of an inveterate Linux explorer. I could boot into any one of these and check my mail, write a letter, work on a manuscript, work on what I get paid to work on...you get the idea.XFCE has the reputation of being lighter and more nimble than its big brothers. Is it?My "play" computer has two 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo processors and 2048 MB of RAM. The graphics controller is a modest but more than adequate Intel 82945G/GZ. It's probably a fairly average desktop computer, which is fine, 'cuz I'm an an average guy. I'm to guys what Rutherford B. Hayes is to American presidents.I loaded a 178-page Writer document into OpenOffice. The document has three fonts and several paragraph styles, and no graphics. In each case, I rebooted the machine, waited a minute for the desktop environment to load, and then opened the document from the file manager.Under XFCE, OpenOffice loaded itself, loaded the document, and was available for editing in 4 seconds.Under Gnome, the same process took 5 seconds.Under KDE, the same process averaged 8 seconds, with more variations.A 12-page .pdf loaded in about a second in ePDF (XFCE) and Ocular (KDE), and a "long second" (not quite 1.5) in Evince (Gnome). (I counted them off. I was too lazy to go look for my wristwatch, but I do most of the cooking here at the Home of the Eggdogs, and I'm pretty good at ticking off seconds.) Maybe I should have dug a big fat .pdf off the server, but quite honestly, I didn't expect to find any significant difference.Firefox took about 4 seconds to load in each environment. The Gnome Firefox has all my bookmarks and a couple of extensions; the other two are out of the box.How about loading the desktop environment itself? From grub to "ready":Gnome: 28 seconds (from MBR grub)XFCE: 41 seconds (from chainloaded grub)KDE: 47 seconds (from chainloaded grub)So I'm not seeing any speed advantages. I don't know if I would if, say, my computer had 1024 MB of RAM. My "work" computer would be a better test, but I want to leave it alone for now. You might say, I'm not in a position to partition.Is there any reason not to use XFCE? Not particularly. I couldn't get a couple of things working. I won't bother to enumerate most of them because I haven't sat down and drilled through all the possible solutions, and none of them are showstoppers. If you rely on certain Gnome or KDE programs, there may not be much point in running XFCE. (I will say that at some point I'll listen to 'Breach and install PCManFM, to see if I like it any better than Thunar.)The newest Linux explorers may wish to approach with caution, especially if they will need to exchange documents with a Windows system and don't feel confident in editing a file called fstab (if you get it angry, you might really get hurt!). The biggest frustration I've found is the inability to assign a compose key. People who rarely or never need to type an accented character might be able to put this off until mañana, but I can't.Is there any reason to go with XFCE? Depends. To me, it's more like Gnome than like KDE, and it isn't really all that different from Gnome in interface concept. But it isn't identical. At least in the package the Mandriva/XFCE community has assembled for our entertainment, XFCE has a friendly, unassuming presence. (Not that Gnome has an ill-tempered, vicious presence. But I can't imagine anybody recoiling in fear & disgust from Mandriva XFCE.) If you have your favorite apps, and especially if they're lightweight and independent, and not "married" to one of the other environments, there's a good chance you'll feel right at home here.So, while XFCE hasn't made me give up on Gnome, the saga is not at an end after all; I'm just going to shut up for a while. This installation is not going away any time soon.

[Urmas]

Hot eggity dog.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

COOL!So, Eddie... what about Mandriva w/ LXDE-Openbox? Hmm?

[Eggdog]

So, Eddie... what about Mandriva w/ LXDE-Openbox? Hmm?

Do you really want three more posts like that? I can't burn DVDs here no matter what I try, so I'd have to get a copy of Free from LinuxCD, which might be a good thing to have around.Right now I'm in, uhh, KDE. This is the KDE version of Mandriva One. The first thing I notice is that it looks more like Mandriva and less like KDE4. This is a good thing. I've never been exactly sure about what is meant by the Plasma Desktop, but I'm wondering if it's been stripped out of here. There is no "folders floating in a mucosal mist" like I saw on other KDE4 attempts. There is a cashew, but it's tiny, and I don't feel all that threatened by it. Mandriva Control Center has taken over some of the grunt work for things that seemed scattered around 15,000 menu entries in other ideations of KDE4 I've seen.I don't know if this is different from downloading Free and installing KDE on it, since I've never done that.I wrote a short letter in KWrite. It was about installing a printer (which was successful). Maybe I'll post it in this thread.I tried to set up an account in KMail but it crashed, and never could I open it again. I uninstalled KMail. Maybe I'll reinstall it, or maybe not.So far, everything except KMail has worked, and worked better than I would have anticipated.

Hot eggity dog.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

You can install LXDE from the repos on your current Mandriva system. http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Mandriva

[Eggdog]

You can install LXDE from the repos on your current Mandriva system.

I could, but part of the exercise here is to experience every desktop environment (or window manager) in a more pure kind of state, as it were, and to discover what really works and what doesn't, and what's different. (So I've got some time on my hands...) I had Ubuntu commingled with Kubuntu once, and it wasn't an especially satisfying experience.I suppose I could install the XFCE version yet again, yank out the XFCE metapackage, and install the LXDE metapackage, but for that I could get the Free DVD and choose what to install, with similar if not quite equal results (after fetching the requisite blobs). Yes?

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Install LXDE on your KDE setup and then boot into LXDE-Openbox and PURGE everything KDE off the system. that's what I just did recently with my Mandriva.

[Eggdog]

The XFCE Compose Key

I've been looking for an answer to the compose key problem for 2 days, and was beginning to despair. I discovered that I was not the only one who couldn't get the xorg.conf rewrite to produce the desired results. This morning I did a last-ditch search, and for some reason a year-old tip on the Ubuntu Forums finally percolated up to where I could see it.Go Menu | Settings | Session and Startup.There's a tab called "Application Autostart".Choose "Add". A screen prompted me for Name, Description, and Command.The command is:

setxkbmap -option compose:lwin

I also learned how to get a quick list of keys that can be used and how to identify them in the above command.

[xeddie@eddie_xfceshuttle ~]$ grep compose: /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst  compose:ralt		 Right Alt  compose:lwin		 Left Win  compose:rwin		 Right Win  compose:menu		 Menu  compose:rctrl		Right Ctrl  compose:caps		 Caps Lock  compose:102		  Less-than/Greater-than[xeddie@eddie_xfceshuttle ~]$

How cool is that??? Laden with élan, it's so cool -- that's my 2¢ worth! (I'm not sure about "compose:102", but I'm not going there today.)OK, should I ever want to adopt XFCE as my main desktop, all significant impediments have been conquered. Off to look for a calculator now.

Edited March 8, 2010 by Eggdog

[securitybreach]

Very nice!!! As far as a calculator, xcalc is very nice and lightweight. Also check out this thread: http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.ph...447&hl=calc

[V.T. Eric Layton]

I keep tellin' yous guys... Xfce is da way to go! :)Calculator? Speedcrunch!

[Eggdog]

I was so stoked by figuring out the compose key that I went up to Providence today and took pictures of Downcity. (Other places have Downtown, but Providence likes to be different.) It was the first nice day since, I don't know, last September.Gnome wanted to open F-Spot, but also gave me the option of opening my camera as a USB drive, which in a way I prefer. Nothing against F-Spot, which is a nice helper app, but if I go the file management route, I can delete the pictures off the camera a lot easier.This XFCE installation has been overall free of Gnome ringers, but connecting the camera opened gThumb, which typically for Gnome helper apps is no-nonsense and highly competent. I didn't have the option to open the camera with Thunar, and the camera didn't appear anywhere in Thunar that I could find. I couldn't find it in Worker (an X11 file manager that is supposed to be like Directory Opus for the Amiga, though I wouldn't know about that because I never saw an Amiga) either.Overall, gThumb got the job done just fine, but score one for Gnome because of versatility.I tried the calculators. Speedcrunch is more keyboard-oriented and fits my style. Xcalc has that delightful X11 look (as you can see) and will take pride of place on the Archlinux beater reclamation project when I get back to that. So thanks for those tips.

:">

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Do you have an entry in your Mandriva Xfce fstab to auto-mount USB devices? The system sees your camera as a USB device. You should be able to mount it and navigate around in it with Thunar just as you would a thumb drive.

[securitybreach]

I tried the calculators. Speedcrunch is more keyboard-oriented and fits my style. Xcalc has that delightful X11 look (as you can see) and will take pride of place on the Archlinux beater reclamation project when I get back to that. So thanks for those tips.

I'll be waiting :' />

[Eggdog]

Do you have an entry in your Mandriva Xfce fstab to auto-mount USB devices? The system sees your camera as a USB device. You should be able to mount it and navigate around in it with Thunar just as you would a thumb drive.

I compared the fstabs in my Xfce and Gnome installations. They're identical except that I had previously added a line for my Samba share in the Xfce fstab. In other words, neither of them has an auto-mount entry.I found a Linux Questions thread that might be useful. I actually have things I need to do around the house today (don't you hate it when that happens?), so I can't spend the day getting Linux to work and wasn't able to take as much time as I would have liked going through all the returns for a search on fstab automount USB.Let me see if I got this right. I could conceivably put a line like

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbflash vfat defaults,umask=0222,utf8=true 0 0

into my Xfce fstab. Except it would be more like

/dev/sda1 /home/xeddie/Photos/incoming vfat defaults,umask=0222,utf8=true 0 0

And I'd have to look up the best umask values (and learn what a umask is, besides something Urmas would wear to a Hallowe'en party). But this leads to more questions.1. I might have several devices I could make be /dev/sda1. For instance, I have several flash drives. I also have two portable hard drives, one of which is filled with .mp3's I might want to listen to someday. Is a line like the above code independent of whatever I might choose to plug in there?2. How can I tell what file system my camera uses? (That sounds like a "run FreeBSD on a toaster oven" kind of question!)3. How come Gnome can figger it out and Xfce can't?Eggdog

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Yes. You can auto-mount USB devices as regular user with an fstab entry for the USB.Here's what mine looks like in Slackware:

/dev/sde1		/mnt/usb	  auto		  rw,noauto,user,sync	 0   0

The nomenclature relating to your USB will be different than mine, of course. I have three hard drives, DVDROM, floppy, and a Zip100 on my system, so my devices are:sda - SATA 0 hard drivesdb - SATA 1 hard drivesdc - EIDE 0 (master) hard drivecdrom - EIDE 1 (master) DVDROMsdd4 - EIDE 1 (slave) Zip100fd0 - floppysde - USBIf you have only one hard drive, Eddie, your USB will probably be "sdb".

[securitybreach]

I would of thought that Mandriva would use Hal to mount drives. In Arch, I do not even have a entry in fstab for usb drives. I just plug it in, open up pcmanfm and click the drive, hal does the rest. Adding an entry to /etc/fstab works but what if you plug in more than one usb device? I know Mandriva uses Hal and I pretty sure the XFCE version does as well, so maybe it has something to do with the filemanager you are using. Try using another filemanager and see if you have the same problems.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Yeah... I thought about that. Most newer distros would use hal. I've just always added that fstab entry since I started using Linux. I guess it's just a habit now.

[Eggdog]

Hi,I didn't have a quick way of knowing exactly what a USB drive is called in Mandriva. I was about 90% sure it's sdb1, so I stuck a flash drive that I knew had some files on it into a USB port and tried running:

mount /dev/sdb1 /home/xeddie/USB

That worked, so I wrote a line in fstab something like what Eric had.

/dev/sdb1 /home/xeddie/USB auto uid=10001,rw,noauto,user,sync 0 0

Eric, I think that word "auto" means "autodetect the filesystem type", right? Which means I don't have to worry about what file system my camera is (and a fine thing, too).Josh, that's a good point. I don't think I'd really be using more than one USB device at once, as I usually don't. The system I set up wouldn't work for everybody, When I'm in the Xfce environment I'll have to be careful about that. Last night I tried Thunar and also Worker, an X11 file manager (I think I wrote about Worker somewhere in this thread), and I got the same results. I forget if I tried Midnight Commander, but I probably did.So yeah, it's all Mandriva below the surface and I would have thought this would all be transparent, but it looks like things work a little differently under Xfce than they do under Gnome.Eddie

[V.T. Eric Layton]

That's right, Eddie --> http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html