I’ve been using a lightweight desktop for a while now and after fooling around with gnome for a few minutes the other day, I noticed a few things that I miss. Namely, automounting and filetype associations.
Running a desktop that consists of just openbox and dmenu I simply don’t have these two features out of the box, but I’ve found a simple solution to both. 
Filetype Associations:
Now you wouldn’t think this would be a big deal on a very lightweight desktop, but having chroimum(google chrome) automatically open .torrent files with my favorite bittorrent application is very useful. This was rather easily acheived on my main distro (archlinux) by installing ‘perl-file-mimeinfo’.
Auto-mounting:
Don’t you just love it when you plug in a thumb drive and it’s automatically mounted? Gnome does it, KDE does it, why the hell can’t you with something lightweight? Well, you can! There’s a simple daemon called, strangely enough, autofs. From a bit of experimentation I’ve discovered how simply it works. You plug in a device and it automounts it. After a period of inactivity(I chose 5 seconds), it automatically unmounts it. When you access the mount point again it remounts until the timeout is hit again. So to “safely” unmount a removable device, simply leave the mount point and wait your specified timeout. Anyhow, you can read more about it here.
