Tag Archives: kde

Automount not working with FreeBSD 12

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FreeBSD 12 is out. This is great! However I had the surprise to find that the automount feature didn’t work in KDE, probably also Gnome, XFCE and any other desktop environment that provide such a feature.

The culprit was easy to find, the Hardware Abstraction Layer has not yet updated to the peculiarities of the latest FreeBSD release.

See, when HAL tries to mount a vfat filesystem on FreeBSD, it adds by default the large option which according to FreeBSD 11.2 mount_msdosfs’s manpage provide support for very large files (>128GB). This option, however, was removed in FreeBSD 12. Thus automount fails.

To temporarily fix this, edit /usr/local/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-storage-methods.fdi. Then remove the large option in the vfat match for FreeBSD. That is:

  <match key="volume.fstype" string="vfat">
    <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.kernel.name" string="Linux">
      ...
  </match>
  <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.kernel.name" string="FreeBSD">
    ...
    <!-- <append key="volume.mount.valid_options" type="strlist">large</append> -->
  </match>

This was already reported in #221709.

Custom user Xsession with SDDM

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Debian stretch is out, a lot of obsolete packages, a lot of major upgrades, which all in all resulted in quite a painful transition the last few days. But I’ll tell you more about that in the following posts.

I don’t really spend much time on Linux nowadays so KDE (along with KDM) has always been my goto solution for a jack all trade no-BS works-out-of-the-box desktop environment. And it worked like that just fine, until… well you know how software goes. KDE has been upgraded, KDM has been depreciated and replaced with SDDM.

I also use xsession so that I have a common way of starting session scripts and daemons (such as this one) and configuring stuff across different desktops. I generally selected custom session in the display manager and that was it. But SDDM does not seem to provide a way to do so, or at least that’s not so clear.

By default, it will execute /etc/sddm/xsession which itself sources /etc/X11/Xsession to which it will pass as argument the value of the Exec line in the desktop file (located in /usr/share/xsessions) describing the currently selected session.

If we want to bypass this, we need to scrap the argument passed to /etc/X11/Xsession no matter what SDDM thinks the current session should be. To do so create a wrapper for Xsession in /etc/X11/user-Xsession:

#!/bin/sh

export PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin

# Discard argument, we don't care about selecting the desktop environment.
/etc/X11/Xsession

And now configure SDDM to use this instead of its own version of it, in /etc/sddm.conf:

[X11]
SessionCommand=/etc/X11/user-Xsession