List external disk drives in FileDialog on Linux

[lukas-w]

Just like we did with OS X (see #1058), we should find a way to list external drives on Linux.

On OS X, we just included the /Volumes directory, which contains all mounted drives, and new drives automatically get mounted and land in there. On Linux however, it's not that easy. Because of the many flavours of Linux, there's no common place for mounting disks, and on top of that, they might not even be mounted.

So the proper way to do this would be using the udisk API. As far as I know, udisk or udisk2 is shipped with most popular distros.

However, to make sure, I'd like to ask everyone to try if the commands udisks and/or udisksctl are available on their Linux system, and write the result and the used distro here. Thanks 🍺

Oh and if someone else than me wants to tackle this, feel free to assign yourself to the issue, as I probably won't be able to do it very soon.

[diizy]

Mint 13 here, udisks and udisksctl are both available.

[lukas-w]

Thanks.
I checked some other distros and will continue compiling a list here.

@diizy Mint 13 is based on Ubuntu 12.04LTS, but 12.04 doesn't have udisks2 in its repositories. Could you check where you got that package (or the command udisksctl) from? I.e. run dpkg -S $(which udisksctl), that will most likely output udisks2, and then run apt-cache policy udisks2 and post that output here please. Thanks ;)

Distro	udisks	udisks2	udisks2 since month
CentOS	Yes	Since 7.0	07/2014
Debian	Since 7 - 2011/02	No
Manjaro	Yes	Yes	Rolling Release
Mint	Yes	Since 15	05/2013, Not in old LTS
Ubuntu	Yes	Since 13.04	04/2013, Not in old LTS
openSUSE	Yes	Since 12.2	09/2012

[diizy]

udisks2:
Installed: 2.1.0-4ubuntu0.1ubuntu12.04ppa1
Candidate: 2.1.0-4ubuntu0.1ubuntu12.04ppa1
Version table:
*** 2.1.0-4ubuntu0.1ubuntu12.04ppa1 0
500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu/
precise/main i386 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[lukas-w]

Thanks. This means udisks2 is neither in Mint's nor in Ubuntu's oldest still supported LTS releases (Mint 13 Maya and Ubuntu 12.04 Precise). Those two releases are very widely used and both will be supported until 04/2017.

However, I suggest only supporting udisks2, as implementing the feature for both udisks and udisks2 would be too much effort, and udisks doesn't even have a C library.

Therefore we'll have to make udisks2 an optional dependeny and disable the feature where it's not available.

[lukas-w]

Note: Qt 5.4 probably solves this issue for us on all platforms with QStorageInfo.

[PhysSong]

Note: Qt 5.4 probably solves this issue for us on all platforms with QStorageInfo.

LMMS requires Qt 5.6 now, so it could be implemented quite easily(not only for Linux).

[allejok96]

LMMS on Windows has this feature already I think...

There is QStorageInfo::mountedVolumes() but I don't see any way to mount volumes like you would with udisks. Displaying the mounted ones on Linux would maybe be helpful, but would that include /home and /var etc...? And subvolumes on btrfs...?

I'm was trying to implement localized sorting and bak-files in the file browser, but the more I tried the deeper mess I got into. Now it has become something of a refactor... so I might as well look into this.

[Owl-A]

Hello. Is @lukas-w still tackling this issue? I'd like to work on this since I happen to specialise in linux internals (at least in theory). So, not only does this make for a great first issue, it'll help me easily put into perspective some of the interactions of LMMS with the OS (in this case, retrieving block device data) and understand coding conventions and community!
Also, note that I might be slow to work till 3rd April, 9 am Indian time, since I'm on a vacation. This seemed to be an issue of interest judging by the recent surge in activity and I, by no means, wish to stall progress on this issue in case this is a priority issue.
Edit: just read the last comment and finally understood why this is a good first issue. QStorageInfo greatly simplifies this!

[allejok96]

@Owl-A I'm glad you're up for the task! But I'm not sure QStorageInfo provides the best solution... Guess we'll see when you've dug deeper.

[zonkmachine]

@Owl-A I see no activity here so I'm unassigning you. Please bump us if you're still deep into this. :)

[MrTopom]

Does anyone is working on it? It could be a good start for me.

[zonkmachine]

@MrTopom Have a go! 👍