DBUS & Automount

Running X from startx and making automount work

I don't use a DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT on Linux - I boot to a console and start X11 via the startx command.

This runs commands from ~/.xinitrc

xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults
setxkbmap -layout gb
xset s noblank
xset s noexpose
xset -dpms
 
~/bin/background.sh &
 
dwmblocks &
 
xfce4-power-manager &
 
pasystray &
 
nm-applet &
 
exec dwm

My window manager is DWM and I don't want/need all the extra stuff of a desktop environment

I would however like to be able to automount external USB drives rather than what I do currently

sudo dmesg #find drive device
sudo mount /dev/xxxx /mnt

then copy files as necessary between /mnt/xxxxx and the machine's filesystem

Afterwards….

cd
sudo sync
sudo umount /mnt

I installed Thunar along with gvfs and all the additional stuff I thought I needed (gvfs-backends* etc).

But Thunar complained that it appears you don't have gvfs or similar…

I briefly tried installing the MATE Desktop environment - and then spent a long time forcing it to use DWM as window manager, and turning off as much as I could

• uninstalled caja
• uninstalled mate-panel
• edited via dconf-editor to make dwm start as window manager….

Then Thunar was happy with gvfs and would automount a USB drive (or more importantly my Swiss Micros calculator's USB drive).

But I wasn't happy with this as a solution - too messy and too much crap going on - messing up the appearance of GTK-aware apps like claws-mail and GNUCASH

I wanted to get back to simply running DWM etc. without all the rest

It appears the issue is that with my method of starting X via ~/.xinitrc I fail to correctly start DBUS. This needs to be started correctly in the setting up of an X-session

The answer isn't to add an invocation of DBUS into my ~/.xinitrc as I first thought.

The answer is to let X11 start via the SYSTEM xinitrc which only happens as long as I don't have my own ~/.xinitrc

Starting X this way which will then run various other things, including DBUS, as the XSession is spun-up via startx

Then the process is finished by running my file ~/.xsession - which is actually just my ~/.xinitrc file renamed to ~/.xsession.

I found this at https://momi.ca/posts/2021-10-11-startxdebian/ which describes my own situation perfectly, and the solution works perfectly.

I can still boot into a console session, and use startx to switch to DWM - and automount works for Thunar