As a followup to an an earlier entry , here's what I've worked out about how to use the standard Gnome automount and other stuff in your own custom environment. All of this is based on Fedora Core 5, but I think it's probably generic to any modern Gnome-based system.

The Gnome automount stuff is done by gnome-volume-manager , which runs as the user and communicates with the system HAL daemon to do all the actual work. This just mounts things when they're recognized; to unmount them, you need to use gnome-umount or gnome-eject . To tell them what to work on, use ' -d <device> ' or the ' -p ' option, which takes a variety of forms; to quote the --help text:

Mount by one of device's nicknames: mountpoint, label, with or without directory prefix

To remount a device after you have unmounted it and fiddled with it, use ' gnome-mount -d <device> '.

The behavior of the volume manager is configured with the gnome-volume-properties program, which you can run without being in Gnome. By default, the volume manager will pop up a Nautilus window browsing the newly inserted volume; you probably want to turn this off. (I also turn off auto-playing newly inserted audio CDs and video DVDs.)

The other Gnome daemon that I found I really wanted to run in my custom environment is esd , the Gnome sound daemon. Otherwise Flash stuff in my browser often failed to have audio (although some will consider this a feature).