[Dapper] How to get mounted disk show on the desktop

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Wed, 2006-03-01 at 11:16 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > But I was very surprised that logging out was not enough. I thought
> > that Nautilus/Gnome being at user lever, logging out should
> > re-initialize each and every component of Gnome. I would not mind
> > an explanation here, I feel this would give me a little more
> > knowledge of my Penguin...
> 
> It's quirky isn't it? A superficial explanation means we have to dig 
> into the guts of the system a bit:
> 
> X and Gnome are designed to display stuff on the screen and work the 
> keyboard and mouse. Other services are controlling the hardware, and 
> making things like partitions and memory sticks visible. If Gnome 
> can't see them, it won't display them. And it isn't Gnome's job to 
> try and second-guess the OS and figure out what's available.
> 
> Letting Gnome know that there's a memory stick available involves 
> serious deep dark voodoo stuff like udev, namedev, sysfs, hotplug, 
> hal, dbus and their friends. So Gnome isn't the only component 
> involved, I suspect that restarting hal may have solved your problem 
> in this specific case. Restarting Gnome simply put you back exactly 
> where you started.
> 
> Unless you are a coding freak it's probably a good idea to treat this 
> stuff like a black box and trust the maintainers to do the right 
> thing. I've been battling with it all for a while and most of the 
> time regret every having started :-)

Thanks for shedding some light :-)
I always assume that apart from a new kernel, nothing warrants a reboot.
But sometimes it's faster to reboot than spend hours trying to figure
out what component needs restarting ! ;-)

For example, to use one of my software, I need to make myself part of
the "lp" group, so I can access /dev/parport0 as a regular user instead
of root. Well, I would not mind knowing how to make this change take
effect without having to reboot... 

--
Vince