How to remove some mounted partition icons?

[Nils Philippsen]

On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 23:14 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-12-28 at 11:03 +0100, Valent Turkovic wrote:
> > I don't have a problem with having my storage partition on my desktop
> > but I also have also 4 other linux distos on my laptop and I see all
> > of their system partitions on my desktop!
> > 
> > I know that there is a way to disable ALL partition shortcuts but then
> > I wouldn't see my usb drives on desktop when I plug in usb flash
> > drives and I don't want that.
> > 
> > So how do I remove only the shortcuts I don't want from my desktop?
> 
> If this is the biggest problem we have in Fedora, I think we're doing
> pretty good. Anyway, I there are two solutions
> 
>  1. Add yet another gconf key to /apps/nautilus/desktop
> 
>  2. Tell such users to use comment=hidden in /etc/fstab entries for
>     such drives and make gvfs honor this so a mount point is hidden
>     if it matches such an /etc/fstab entry.
> 
> Since this affects only the kind of people who have > 1 Linux distro
> installed (for dual- or tripple-booting with Windows and Mac OS X you
> actually want this. IMO ditto for dual booting with other Linux
> installations but apparently others don't think so), I think we should
> go for 2. Alex?

I'm still not convinced that ordinary users need (or want) these
automatic icons for fixed partitions. There are people who are
interested in things as mundane as "partitions"(*) and people who
aren't. I'd guess that often the former (administrator types) haven't
much use for these cluttering the desktop and that most of the latter
(Aunt Tilly types) aren't interested in the fact that their "shared
photos" folder is on an obscure "/data" partition (set up by their
nephew).

(*): It's odd that the desktop treats physical partitions differently
than logical volumes when ordinary users shouldn't be interested in the
difference.

If I were a user ;-) I would find it sensible to have (automatic) icons
for:

- computer, home, trash
- (partitions on) removable media, cameras, etc.

I would find it quite strange to have automatic icons on the desktop
which point to directories on which I can't even write. The chance for a
read-only (mounted) directory on a fixed physical partition (or even
logical volume) to be interesting to a normal user seems rather remote
to me. If such a partition contained a writable directory for this user
(e.g. for shared somethings), then I wouldn't see how icons on the
desktop could be created automatically in a sensible way (recursively
scanning the tree underneath doesn't count). As such directories would
surely be manually created by some administrator type and would be
long-lived, any desktop icons for them could easily be created as
symlinks in the desktop directories of the users without much additional
work.

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
 Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."  --  B. Franklin, 1759
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