Thunar Volume Manager (thunar-volman)

The Thunar Volume Manager is an extension for the Thunar file manager, which enables automatic management of removable drives and media. For example, if thunar-volman is installed and configured properly, and you plug in your digital camera, it will automatically launch your preferred photo application and import the new pictures from the camera into your photo collection.

The advantage of Thunar Volume Manager over other solutions (like gnome-volume-manager or ivman) is that it does not require an additional daemon to be running in the users desktop session, which means it is a very lightweight solution. In addition, the Thunar Volume Manager smoothly integrates into the Thunar file manager and the Xfce desktop.

It was designed to look and behave similar to gnome-volume-manager to get consistent removable drive and media management in Xfce and GNOME. This is to help GNOME refugees and people using both Xfce and GNOME.

The Thunar user manual explains the configuration of the Thunar Volume Manager. The user manual is also available in other languages:

• Spanish
• Basque
• French
• Polish
• Japanese
• Russian
• Chinese (traditional)

However, this is still work in progress, and so the user manual may not be fully translated to your language yet.

You will need atleast the following software packages in order to install and use the Thunar Volume Manager:

• Thunar file manager 0.5.1 or above
• |D-Bus 0.34 or above (the dbus and dbus-glib devel packages)
• HAL 0.5.0 or above (the hal and libhal devel packages)

Source tarballs and binary packages of the latest stable release 0.3.80 (and earlier releases) are available from the Xfce Goodies download page.

The Thunar Volume Manager - just like the other Xfce Goodies - is available from the Xfce Goodies SVN repository, which means that you will need to install a Subversion client in order to be able to check out from the SVN repository (you can use the web interface for browsing the repository).

You can download the latest version of thunar-volman using the following command:

svn co http://svn.xfce.org/svn/goodies/thunar-volman/trunk \
       thunar-volman
 

This will create a new directory thunar-volman in the current path, which contains the latest version from the repository.

If you downloaded a release tarball, you can simply run

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

now. The prefix must be the same prefix where Thunar is installed. You can find out the prefix using the following command:

pkg-config --variable prefix thunarx-1

Else if you use a SVN snapshot, you need to run

sh autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local

instead, because the automatically generated files are not included in the repository.

If the configure script complains about missing thunarx-1 package and you are using a binary package for Thunar, be sure to install the appropriate -devel package (i.e. for Debian/Ubuntu it is libthunar-vfs-1-dev). Next, you continue with

make
make install

where the install step must be done with superuser privilegues.

Bugs should be reported to the Xfce bug tracking system (product Thunar Plugins, component thunar-volman). You will need to create an account for yourself.