I have problems with auotmounting in XFCE 4.8 under Fedora 16. I think that I have diagnosed part of this problem. When XFCE starts, Thunar is not automatically started. Therefore there is nothing to handle the mounting part of plugging in a new volume. When Thunar is running this mounting does happen, at least for USB devices. There are lots of ways to start Thunar. Some of them start Thunar as a daemon and some of them don't. The problem with starting Thunar as a non-daemon is that Thunar will probably eventually go away, and then automounting will no longer work. It thus appears to me that XFCE should start up Thunar as a daemon during startup. This should happen before any connected external storage devices are recognized, so that volumes in them can be mounted. How can this be arranged? Should this be escalted up to a general XFCE forum, or is this specific to XFCE under Fedora? The other part of my automounting problem appears to be that Thunar doesn't have the same notion of removable drives as does the XFCE desktop manager. I have an external IDE disk. When this disk is plugged in (albeit in a slightly unusual way, as the disk is in a removable disk tray in the CD slot of a Thinkpad), the XFCE desktop correctly shows an icon for it and labels it as a removable volume. However, this volume is not automounted, even when Thunar is running. How can Thunar be coerced to automount this volume? Peter F. Patel-Schneider Bell Labs Research