Drive Mount Applet


Table of Contents
Drive Mount Applet

Drive Mount Applet

Drive Mount Applet, shown in Figure 1, allows you to quickly and easily mount and unmount various types of drives and filesystems on your computer. To add this applet to a Panel, right-click on the Panel and choose Panel->Add to panel->Applet->Utility->Drive Mount.

NoteBackground Information for Beginners
 

Many file systems on Linux and Unix systems must be manually mounted and unmounted. After a file system is mounted, you can read and write to it. When you are finished with a file system, you should unmount it. It is important to unmount removable drives, such as floppy disks and Zip disks, before removing the media, because Linux and Unix systems do not always write the changes made immediately. They typically buffer the changes made to the disk in order to improve the speed of the system. Partitions on fixed drives, such as your hard drive, are typically mounted automatically when your computer boots and unmounted when it shuts down. Removable media must be mounted and unmounted by hand, such as by using the Drive Mount applet.

The "root filesystem" is the main filesystem on your computer starting with "/" (root). Other filesystems are associated with directories inside the root filesystem. These are called "mount points", which are just empty directories. When a filesystem is mounted, its contents appear inside this directory. As an example, most systems create a mount point "/mnt/floppy" which is just an empty directory if your floppy drive is not mounted. It contains the contents of your floppy if the floppy drive is mounted.

Customization

You can customize Drive Mount applet by right-clicking on it and choosing Properties…. This will open the Properties dialog(shown in Figure 3), which allows you to change various settings.

The properties are:

After you have made all the changes you want, click on OK to apply the changes and close the Properties dialog. Click Apply to apply changes without closing. Close closes Properties without saving changes which have not been applied. Applied changes cannot be cancelled.

Configuring Your System

WarningFor Advanced Users
 

This section is intended for system administrators and advanced users.

In order for Drive Mount Applet to work properly, the system may need to be configured by the system administrator, using root privileges. This section provides a very basic introduction.

Information describing the mount point and filesystem type of each drive is kept in /etc/fstab. This can be configured by hand or by using the linuxconf application. For drives which do not always have a single filesystem type (such as a floppy drive which may have msdos or ext2 filesystems), you should use "auto" for the filesystem type. Each device has a single line in /etc/fstab of the following form:

    /dev/fd0        /mnt/floppy      auto    noauto,rw,user  0 0
    
This entry describes the first floppy device (/dev/fd0) as having a mount point of /mnt/floppy, a variable filesystem type which should be automatically detected, and the following configurations: "noauto"— Do not automatically mount the drive when the computer is booted, "rw"— The drive is readable and writable, and "user"— Users have permission to mount the drive. These, along with the last two fields which we do not describe here, are discussed in detail in the fstab man pages, available by typing man fstab or through the GNOME Help Browser.

The linuxconf application provides a graphical interface for controlling these filesystems. To start linuxconf, just type linuxconf in a shell window (you must log in as root). Select Config->filesystems->Access local drive. To edit an entry, just select it. linuxconf is meant to be easy to use and has its own internal help system to guide you through the process. You may also add new entries by selecting the Add button.

Troubleshooting and Understanding Error Messages

If you do not have your system configured properly, you may encounter certain error messages when trying to mount or access certain drives. Here are some of the more common error messages and their causes:

Authors

Drive Mount Applet was written by John Ellis (). Please send all comments, suggestions, and bug reports to the GNOME bug tracking database. (Instructions for submitting bug reports can be found on-line. If you are using GNOME 1.1 or later, you can also use Bug Report Tool (bug-buddy), available in the Utilities submenu of Main Menu, for submitting bug reports.

This manual was written by Dan Mueth (). Please send all comments and suggestions regarding this manual to the GNOME Documentation Project by sending an email to . You can also submit comments online by using the GNOME Documentation Status Table.