How do I mount a USB in plain XMonad?

Question

Now that I am using XMonad I find that my USB devices no longer automount when I plug them into my computer. How do I get them to automount again just like they did when I was using gnome?

Answer 1

I'd recommend one of the udisks-based solutions. uam seems to do the job without too much configuration. udisks-glue is also decent for scripting.

• uam:

This is just simple tool for mounting pendrives and alikes when inserted -- something like ivman or functionality integrated in KDE/GNOME.

• udiskie:

udiskie is a simple daemon that uses udisks to automatically mount removable storage devices.

Answer 2

The way that I have solved that problem is to use nautilus running the the background to continue to manage that for me. You can do that like so:

nautilus --no-desktop -n &

If you happen to start XMonad using a custom .xsession file then that would be the perfect place to put that line. Make sure you put it before the 'exec xmonad' command.

Answer 3

On Arch Linux ldm works quite well with plain XMonad.

Disks will automatically mount to /media. Disks may be unmounted with sudo pumount or sudo umount.

References:

• https://github.com/LemonBoy/ldm
• http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=60088
• http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=52272

Answer 4

I think you are better off with udisks. It comes installed by default (at least on Ubuntu) and handles the standard mounting and unmounting like a charm. You can read all about it here - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticallyMountPartitions

Btw as the documentation says, udisks is not gnome specific.