The Thunar Volume Manager ========================= The Thunar-VFS library contains an abstract interface to volume managers and implementations of this interface for some platforms (currently only FreeBSD and Linux with HAL is known to work properly). Using this abstract interface (in fact the platform specific implementations of the interface), Thunar is able to display mounted and mountable volumes in the shortcuts pane, and allows the user to mount or eject/unmount these volumes from the context menu. In addition, if the user double-clicks a volume in the shortcuts pane (or requests to open the shortcut in a new window), Thunar will first try to mount the volume if it's not already mounted. Unfortunately, this functionality is currently only available to BSD users. I'm looking for people to provide implementations of ThunarVfsVolume and ThunarVfsVolumeManager (see thunar-vfs-volume.h) for other platforms. If you need a starting point, you should have a look at the FreeBSD implemen- tation in thunar-vfs-volume-freebsd.c, it's a bit tricky when it comes to details, but it should give you the basic idea. Notes for FreeBSD users ------------------------ FreeBSD offers a really nice option, which allows regular users to mount devices on every folder owned by the user. It is very handy for a single user desktop system. You'll need to enable the vfs.usermount option for this to work: # sysctl -w vfs.usermount=1 Afterwards, just change the owner of the mount points for removable devices to your user id, i.e. # chown benny /mnt/dvd # chown benny /mnt/cdrw and you will be able to mount and unmount your DVD and CD-RW in Thunar. In order to be able to eject removable devices, you will need to install the eject utility from the sysutils/eject port. Notes for Linux users --------------------- On Linux platforms, Thunar requires HAL 0.5 or better to provide information about volumes. To be able to eject dics, you will need the eject utility program.