Volume management without Nautilus

So I’ve been playing around with WMII for a while now, soaking in the glory of tiling window managers. One thing that’s a bit inconvienient is easy automounting. I don’t want to have to manually create a directory in /media and mount each and every teeny-tiny usb drive I might plug into my system.

Turns out that recently the Ubuntu/Gnome folks have decided that Nautilus will be handling the automounting of drives and such instead of the gnome-volume-manager. This is all well and good if you’re using nautilus, but for console-junkies it’s not so helpful.

The gnome-volume-manager package in the repo is compiled with the “–disable-automount” configure option, so to enable it we have to recompile:

First make sure you have all the required libraries to build:

sudo aptitude build-dep gnome-volume-manager

Then download the source:

apt-get source gnome-volume-manager

configure:

cd gnome-volume-manager-2.24.0
./configure --enable-automount --disable-dependency-tracking

build and install:

make
sudo make install

Then just add to your startup script and you should be up and running.

Don’t forget to use gnome-volume-properties to configure the volume manager to actually automount.

3 Comments

  • By Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, November 22, 2008 @ 1:46 pm

    Sweet. I haven’t given this a try yet, but I’ll add it to my long list of Linux todos…

    Thanks!

  • By gumby, July 26, 2009 @ 12:12 am

    Didn’t work for me. When I run it, it quits right away.

    I’m running Jaunty 9.04. PS shows something called gvfs-hal-volume & gvfs-hal-volume-manager running. I wonder if these are getting in the way of things.

  • By Spencer, July 26, 2009 @ 7:46 am

    Yeah, I think they’ve changed some of the volume management in Jaunty. I’ll post again when I get it under control.

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