Don't think im doing this right =\

[Arman]

Wow, I guess I got lucky today. Was trying to find out how to turn off the screensaver in Mint, when I stumbled upon "mintDesktop", which allowed me to hide mounted volumes .

[altair4]

The only problem with using mintDesktop to turn it off is that it will also turn it off for any USB storage device you plug in. If everything is working properly when you insert a USB disk, Nautilus will pop up and when your done you can unmount it from there. But if you forget and close nautilus it's nice to have the USB mount icon on the desktop so you remember to unmount it before you you physically remove it.

[viking777]

The only problem with using mintDesktop to turn it off is that it will also turn it off for any USB storage device you plug in. If everything is working properly when you insert a USB disk, Nautilus will pop up and when your done you can unmount it from there. But if you forget and close nautilus it's nice to have the USB mount icon on the desktop so you remember to unmount it before you you physically remove it.

That 'all or nothing' approach from Gnome absolutely infuriates me . I have spent ages looking for ways around it, but there aren't any. It is particularly annoying if, like me, you have a lot of partitions, you end up with a deskful of worthless ruddy icons for volumes mounted by fstab just so you can see when you have mounted volumes that you have plugged in - crazy. Even KDE4 gets this right (nothing else mind) why Gnome can't is beyond me.

I know of two workrounds though neither of them are any good. The first is to change the mount point of all your fstab volumes to /mnt instead of /media. They will then no longer appear on the desktop. Trouble is with that is that they will not appear anywhere else either (like the 'Places' menu where I actually want them to appear). The second, and the one I employ at the moment, is to right click on the 'unwanted' icons and select 'Stretch Icon' (it should say resize icon but it doesn't) you can then minimize the icon to the smallest possible size and shove it out of the way in a corner somewhere where you can't easily see it. Extremely inelegant but it works to a certain extent.

If anybody does know of a better way I would be delighted to hear about it.

[altair4]

viking777,

Have you tried this:
Mount the partition to /mnt so there is no desktop icon. Bring up Nautilus and migrate to /mnt/mount_point. Then Bookmark it. Once bookmarked ( and can be renamed ) it will show up under "Places".

[viking777]

viking777,

Have you tried this:
Mount the partition to /mnt so there is no desktop icon. Bring up Nautilus and migrate to /mnt/mount_point. Then Bookmark it. Once bookmarked ( and can be renamed ) it will show up under "Places".

While you were typing your reply, that is EXACTLY what I was doing!!! (Why it took me so long to think of it I don't know). Anyway, you are absolutely right, this works perfectly. The only problem I had was with Virtualbox, one of the volumes I have on my hard disk contains Vbox vdi files, and since I moved them it refused to allow me to simply move the reference to the new location, something to do with snapshots containing links to the old location (and deleting the snapshots didn't work). Anyway, I simply deleted the virtual machine and recreated it with the new vdi locations. I lost a bit of data that I had created on the old snapshot, but it is not a big deal I can recreate that.

Thanks for the reply. I should have asked ages ago instead of waiting for my slow old brain to grind out a solution

[Fred]

I haven't used Gnome lately and don't currently have a Gnome version installed anywhere on this machine. Does Gnome not have a "desktop" folder in the user's /home? If so can you not just move the icon out of the "desktop" folder into a ".hold" folder, or something similar?

I was just sitting here trying to remember how I have seen this problem solved before. There is a relatively clean way, I just can't remember it.

Fred

[viking777]

I haven't used Gnome lately and don't currently have a Gnome version installed anywhere on this machine. Does Gnome not have a "desktop" folder in the user's /home? If so can you not just move the icon out of the "desktop" folder into a ".hold" folder, or something similar?

I was just sitting here trying to remember how I have seen this problem solved before. There is a relatively clean way, I just can't remember it.

Fred

Gnome does have a /home/Desktop folder Fred, but the icons aren't in there, I tried that a while back. Anyway changing the fstab entries from /media to /mnt for all my partitions and then creating Bookmarks for the /mnt locations has worked perfectly (except for the slight hiccup with Virtualbox). It shouldn't be that difficult though. A simple context menu called 'Hide Icon' is the most sensible way to deal with it, but that would need the people who write Gnome to get a grip on how people actually use a Desktop and they haven't had that for the past decade, although the latest incarnation of Gnome on Gloria is the best I have seen. I tried Gnome on Fedora 11 recently and it is still as useless as it always was, so I guess that the Mint team must make a few changes to the Gnome code? I don't know for sure. I only know that their version is usable and Fedora's isn't. If they do make changes to the Gnome code, then I wish they would consider that 'Hide Icon' context menu next time round