[gentoo-user] [micro HOWTO] Adding custom mount options for gnome-mounted drives

[walt <w41ter@gmail.com>]

For many weeks I've been looking for a way to add the 'noatime'
and 'nodiratime' flags for drives that are automounted in gnome.

Sifting through the mountains of <mis>information about how hal,
hotplug, udev, and gnome interact was painful, but I finally
stumbled across a working method on the LinuxFromScratch website.

In the good-ole days (several months ago) the way to do it would
have been to put a customized fdi file in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/.

More recently hal has pushed that task up to the 'desktop' layer,
e.g. gnome, kde, kfce, etc.  I suppose that's because such a
preference should be left up to the user instead of the sysadmin,
but I can only speculate about what motivates the hal daemon.

In gnome, the way to do it is to use the gconf editor (open the
'Configuration Editor' in the Applications::System-Tools drop-
down menu).

Below the root entry, you'll see 'apps', 'desktop', 'schemas',
and 'system'.  Expand 'system' and then 'storage' below that,
and finally 'default_options' below that.

You should see a list of filesystem types, like iso9660, ntfs,
and so on.  Each filesystem type has a 'mount_options' key that
you can edit by double-clicking on it.

Thus, each filesystem type has its own custom mount options --
but what happened to ext2?  I've reformatted some of my USB
sticks from vfat to ext2, and I'd like to customized the mount
options for them too.

LinuxFromScratch to the rescue!  They point out that the gconf
editor can't edit everything that appears in the gnome 'registry'
but there is a command-line tool 'gconftool-2' that can.

The way to customize the default mount options for ext2 drives
is to do this from a command prompt:

gconftool-2 --type list --list-type=string \
     --set /system/storage/default_options/ext2/mount_options \
     "[noatime,nodiratime]"

See how simple and intuitive once you have an example staring
you in the face?  Dunno why I didn't just try that in the first
place :o/

Lest you kde fans sneer at us gnome gnerds, see if you can do
the same thing using the tools that kde provides you!

Does kde allow you to automount USB sticks and external hard
drives?  And customize the mount options?