FreeBSD GNOME removable media

How do I mount my removable media in Nautilus?

As of GNOME 2.16, FreeBSD supports , a component from the project. HAL provides seamless hardware integration with modern UNIX desktop environment such as GNOME. This means auto-mounting of hardware is as easy as starting a few daemons at boot time, and making sure sysutils/gnome-volume-manager is installed. If you installed x11/gnome2 you already have gnome-volume-manager installed.

The daemons that must be started prior to logging into GNOME are, dbus, polkitd, and hald in that order. To do this, add the following to /etc/rc.conf, and reboot:

dbus_enable="YES"
polkitd_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
       

These services are automatically started if are enabled.

Note: your user account must be a member of the operator group for automatic mounting to work. To add yourself to the operator group, execute the following command as root:

# pw group mod operator -m 
       

For example, to add the user marcus to the operator group, use the following command:

# pw group mod operator -m marcus
       

That's it! You should now see your USB key drives and CD-ROMs magically appear on your desktop. However, if you are having problems with auto-mounting or HAL in general, you should collect the following (in addition to other information):

1. Output of lshal
2. Output of sysctl -b kern.geom.conftxt
3. Contents of /etc/fstab
4. Output of mount
5. Full dmesg output
6. Stop hald, then run it manually using /usr/local/sbin/hald --daemon=no --verbose-yes and provide the output
7. If using GNOME, and a volume is not mounting properly, include the output of gnome-mount --block --no-ui --verbose --hal-udi ( is the Unique Device Identifier obtained from the output of lshal for the device that is not mounting properly)

You can also mount fixed storage media such as FAT or NTFS partitions (maybe you are dual booting) using HAL. For this to work you must must edit /usr/local/etc/PolicyKit/privilege.d/hal-storage-fixed-mount.privilege and add your username to the Allow list:

[Policy]
Allow=uid:
       

For example, to allow the user marcus to mount fixed storage media, add the following to hal-storage-fixed-mount.privilege:

[Policy]
Allow=uid:marcus
       

Gary Dunn also provides a for user-mounting SMB volumes.