GnomeMountXubuntu

Summary

gnome-mount is a relatively new addition to the Utopia stack. It provides users with a nice GUI to configure mount options, consistently handle encrypted devices, and so on. Thus it replaces the clumsy HAL fdi policies for mount options and can also replace the hideous pmount hacks in g-v-m and pmount with something that actually works smoothly.

Rationale

gnome-mount and the hal mount backend are used by upstream by default now, they did not accept our pmount-centric solution. Thus Gnome has no support for mount policies and only little support for encrypted devices in Dapper.

Use cases

  • Joe keeps his music and video collection on a USB hard disk and wants other users to access it as well. In Dapper, VFAT partitions on USB devices are always mounted with umask 077, and there is no GUI way to change this.
  • Martin carries his GPG and SSH keys on an encrypted USB stick partition. In dapper, the encrypted partition is automatically mounted (after asking for the passphrase), but the device is not integrated into HAL at all, which means that you cannot assign it to a label or configure mount policy, and the user interface sees a confusing spare dummy drive.

Scope

The changes in this specification affect the handling of removable devices in Xubuntu to use the same solution as in Ubuntu under Gnome.

Design

  • Change gnome-mount to make it not depend on any Gnome libraries which are inappropriate for XFCE.

Implementation

gnome-mount

The only Gnome-specific part in gnome-mount which is not appropriate for XFCE is the Gnome password input dialog. This is already marked as deprecated in the Gnome API, since it is about to be moved to GTK. In case it does not happen soon, we need to replace it with our own implementation if XFCE adopts it.

Data preservation and migration

Since until dapper we do not have any user policy settings, no data needs to be migrated.

CategorySpec

GnomeMountXubuntu (last edited 2008-08-06 16:13:55 by localhost)