GWorkspace, how to easily mount/unmount volumes

GWorkspace allows for easy mounting and unmounting of volumes (disks, usb sticks, CD-ROMs) like you would do manually on console, without the requirement of daemons or other tools.

Here is how.

First, be sure your underlying operating system is correctly configured to allow you to do that. I'll show as example how I configured my Debian system.

Your current user needs to have the permissions to mount the volume(s), this is usually done by being part of the correct group. For Debian we find cdrom and floppy as ready groups

cdrom:x:24:multix

The predefined mount-point for the cdrom is /mnt/cdrom, since I usually handle with USB sticks I added a mount point for it:

$ ls -l /media/
total 8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    6 Jan  1  1970 cdrom -> cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan  1  1970 cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 27 14:01 usb

Now, let's add the correct lines to /etc/fstab for our usb entry. The cdrom entry is usually already configured by Debian.

/dev/hdc        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
/dev/sdb        /media/usb      auto    defaults,users  0       0

I auto shall determine the file system automagically, while users allows for user permissions for the mounted files. You can check if everything is configured fine if you can "mount" from the command line with your current user.

Then open SystemPreferences and configure the managed paths as shown here:

SystemPreferences - Mount points

Configure the mount points for removable media, here I have enabled the cdrom and the usb mount points. The mtab path is currently ignored by GWorkspace, so don't bother and the default value is anyway correct for Linux.

Now, in GWorkspace we can select Check for disks under the Tools menu.

GWorkspace - check for disks

If everything goes well, voilà, your volume will get mounted. It will appear on the destkop if you have the Desktop enabled and you can show its content. In any case it shall be visible in the File Viewer in its mount place.

Usb stick contents

If all options are set correctly as suggested, the volume is readable, writable as you can check with the Attributes Inspector. Also we can open the .zip file with Zipper easily.

Zipper and Attributes

To unmount a volume, just drag its icon to the Recycle Bin.