Automounting a storage device with GNOME

Do you have an external hard drive that always mounts in /media/disk or some totally unuseful location? Here I’m going to try to explain the best way I found to have my partitions mounted exactly where I want them.

Basically GNOME handles all this stuff (removable media) with gnome-volume-manager, which uses HAL to grab information, and you can configure it with gnome-volume-properties. All the work is actually done by gnome-mount which can be configured with GConf.

In my case I have an external hard drive with two partitions, I want to have them mounted in /media/external-1 and /media/external-2.

The best way to do that is configuring HAL. There is very handy tool that allows you to see all the information available through HAL, that is hal-device. With that tool I’m able to see the following:

0: udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_2D11_15EE'
   volume.mount_point = ''  (string)
   volume.label = ''  (string)
   volume.uuid = '2D11-15EE'  (string)
   block.device = '/dev/sda1'  (string)

1: udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_31d943b3_b43c_4388_87db_3e2f30cf87d9'
   volume.mount_point = ''  (string)
   volume.label = ''  (string)
   volume.uuid = '31d943b3-b43c-4388-87db-3e2f30cf87d9'  (string)
   block.device = '/dev/sda2'  (string)

I have found my two parttions, the important thing is the uuid (2D11-15EE, 31d943b3-b43c-4388-87db-3e2f30cf87d9), the best thing to do is to choose a label for each partition and then the mount point will be determined automatically

To do that I have to add a HAL’s user policy file:

/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/95userpolicy/10-external.fdi:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<deviceinfo version="0.2">

<device>
<match key="block.is_volume" bool="true">
<match key="volume.uuid" string="2D11-15EE">
<merge key="volume.label" type="string">external-1</merge>
</match>
<match key="volume.uuid" string="31d943b3-b43c-4388-87db-3e2f30cf87d9">
<merge key="volume.label" type="string">external-2</merge>
</match>
</match>
</device>

</deviceinfo>

That’s it, now each time I plug in my hard drive the two partitions are auto mounted exactly where I want them 🙂

But wait, I don’t like that noexec mount option that appears by default in my external-2 partition. In order to fix that I can configure gnome-mount to change the defaults, or I can set the options I want.

First I need my complete UDI:

/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_31d943b3_b43c_4388_87db_3e2f30cf87d9

Then I set the proper GConf key:

gconftool-2 --type string -s /system/storage/volumes/_org_freedesktop_Hal_devices_volume_uuid_31d943b3_b43c_4388_87db_3e2f30cf87d9/mount_options "[exec]"

Yes, I know the key is huge, it’s sopposed to be “only” the volume’s UUID (31d943b3_b43c_4388_87db_3e2f30cf87d9) but I guess they forgot to allow the fancy way.

In order to have the right mount point I could have done the following instead, but with this the volumes will appear with no label.

gconftool-2 --type string -s /system/storage/volumes/_org_freedesktop_Hal_devices_volume_uuid_32d943b3_b43c_4388_87db_3e2f30cf87d9/mount_point "external-2"

I hope you find this useful.