Other Automount for XFCE4 under FreeBSD 11.0 RELEASE.

[Improvisor]

Greetings.
I ran FreeBSD 10 with XFCE for nearly three years with no trouble automounting a USB either in command line or in XFCE.
Then, I did a fresh installation of FreeBSD 11.0 RELEASE; indeed, more than one. The last was yesterday. I followed the instructions in the Handbook, and have read every post on the subject which I have been able to find over the past three months, but these posts are all too old to be of use.
An automount of a USB works perfectly in Command Line, but always breaks in XFCE. It is the oft-quoted "Cannot mount volume:" related to "hal-fstab", but I can find no trace of this file.
For what some would call "fun", I loaded Gnome, KDE, and Lumina as well, always with the same result. Gritting my teeth, I have always dutifully put "hald-enable="YES" into /etc/rc.conf, just in case.
Nothing works; always the same "hal-fstab". I don't even want anything to do with HAL, usually useless, but XORG, loaded even yesterday by "pkg install xorg", breaks without it.
Any replies from those wise to this situation will be most appreciated, and those that resolve what must be a simple issue for those initiated in this mystery will be heaped with gratitude.

 

[SirDice]

I have always dutifully put "hald-enable="YES" into /etc/rc.conf, just in case.

It's hald_enable not hald-enable.

I don't even want anything to do with HAL, usually useless, but XORG, loaded even yesterday by "pkg install xorg", breaks without it.

Xorg hasn't depended on HAL for quite some time. It doesn't use or require HAL on FreeBSD.

Note that ports are exactly the same on all versions of FreeBSD. So if you had an up to date FreeBSD 10 you would have had the same ports/packages as a recent FreeBSD 11.

 

[Improvisor]

Sorry, my mistake on this post. hald_enable is correct in rc.conf.

So, why are there so many unsolved queries all over the Web about this "Cannot mount file. Cannot lock file hal.mtab" (sorry, mtab, not fstab as I sleepwrote in the first post) not only for FreeBSD, but many other systems, especially Linux?

Since automount works perfectly in Command Line, what is the nonsense going on with the GUI, in this case, XFCE? It seems that hal, since, as you explain, being unused in xorg, must be legacy or artefact in XFCE, KDE, and Lumina. Some people say that it has to do with permissions, and others that somehow that database of removeable devices, mtab, is not created; I think that mtab, being a hal-ism, is being called for by some snippet of code that somebody forgot to remove from these GUIs, but what do I know?

What I am looking for is a definitive solution to the inability of these GUIs to automount USBs.

That solution having been found and posted in this thread will be a boon to many people who, like me, want to use FreeBSD exclusively, because we all know that FreeBSD is the BEST.