Hi all. Hope this is the right place to post this question.

I'm running Gentoo linux on an amd64 box. Recently upgraded to KDE 4.3.5. Then noticed that plugin usb devices, like thumb drives or my camera, no longer get noticed by KDE. I can tell by looking at the syslog that dbus and friends are noticing them coming on, setting up dev entries and stuff, but the little device notifier widget never seems to get the message.

After some consultation with the gentoo folks, I figured out that I seem to be missing the removable device notifier service (in Service Manager), which I gather is the guy who's supposed to be dealing with popup devices.

It's not immediately obvious to me how I got into this pickle. Everything was working great in the previous version (4.1.something, I believe) and I'm not doing anything wacky in my system configuration. Can anybody tell me where that service is supposed to come from? Ideally, what gentoo package implements it, so I can figure out why it's not getting installed?

Thanks in advance...

"Removable Device Automounter" is an KDE service provided in KDE 4.4 and onwards only. I believe it may have existed on kde-apps.org prior to entering KDE SC, so perhaps you installed it from there.

Does dbus and friends include HAL? HAL is required at this time by KDE's Solid framework in order to discover and monitor hardware ( including batteries, removable devices, etc )

Also make sure you have the "Device Notifier" applet installed, and in your panel.

I don't beleive I've ever had the removable device automounter service installed; I certainly never installed it explicitly. I'd never heard of it until this problem popped up.

Dbus and friends are configured to use hal, and all that stuff appears to be correctly installed and working.

The device notifier applet is in the panel.

All that above stuff is stock gentoo configuration, I'm running a pretty vanilla setup.

So given that the new service doesn't exist until 4.4, what's the flow of control supposed to be in 4.3? Like I said above, pluggable stuff is working at the system level, I can see a bunch of mechanism wake up when I plug things in. Is the device notifier meant to be listening for dbus events? 4.4 is still marked experimental in gentoo's portage tree, but perhaps I should try it anyway? I can't go back much older, they've deprecated everything prior to 4.3.3.

Thanks...

Does "solid-hardware list" generate a large quantity of output similar to this?

Code: Select all

udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/pci_8086_2843'

Also, there should be a number of files in $KDEDIR/share/apps/solid/actions/ which should all be *.desktop files, do these exist?