Desktop automounting pain
Ubuntu’s live CD installer, Ubiquity, needs to suppress desktop automounting while it’s doing partitioning and generally messing about with mount points, otherwise its temporary mount points end up busy on unmount due to some smart-arse desktop component that decides to open a window for it.
To date, it employs the following methods, each of which was sufficient at the time:
- Set the
/desktop/gnome/volume_manager/automount_drives
and/desktop/gnome/volume_manager/automount_media
gconf keys tofalse
. - Tell
kded
to unload itsmedianotifier
module, and load it again just before the installer exits. - Set the
/apps/nautilus/desktop/volumes_visible
gconf key tofalse
. - Set the
AutomountDrives
andAutomountMedia
keys in$HOME/.config/Thunar/volmanrc
toFALSE
. - Set the
/apps/nautilus/preferences/media_automount
and/apps/nautilus/preferences/media_automount_open
gconf keys tofalse
. - The entire installer is run under
hal-lock --interface org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Storage --exclusive
. - Set the
/apps/nautilus/preferences/media_autorun_never
gconf key totrue
(experimental, but apparently now required since nautilus uses the gio volume monitor).
This is getting ridiculous. Dear desktop implementors: please pick a configuration mechanism and stick to it, and provide backward compatibility if you can’t. This is not a rocket-science concept.
I rather liked the hal-lock
mechanism; it was simple and involved minimal
fuss. I had hoped that it might end up as a standard, but I guess that
would be too easy.