Once you have gnome-volume-manager, you must have gnome-mount as well. The gnome-mount commands are planed to be used instend of invoking mount(1) /umount(1) /eject(1) in Gnome softwares. It takes care the settings like mount options and mount location.

The setting are saved in GConf configuration system (again). You can changing the setting for a specific device or file system format.

Let’s say, if you have a SD Card which is formated in vfat. After you insert the SD Card into your computer, the gnome-volume-manager will auto-mount the storge automatically. You can change and mount options for the device by right click the device, and choose properity. (Sorry, the screenshot is in Chiense.)

You can put the mount options into the dialog and reload the device. The system will mount the device with the options automatically.

For example, many people like me are using files name with CJK characters. It’s inconvenience if the file system does not be mounted with utf8 options. You can just put the utf8 options in the mount options to fix the issue.

And of couse, you can change the setting by CLI commands. It’s very easy, you can get and config the setting by gnome-mount command (the /dev/mmcblk0p1 is the device node name of SD Card),

$ gnome-mount –display-settings –device /dev/mmcblk0p1
gnome-mount 0.6
Displaying settings for volume (overrides drive settings)
hal udi: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_3961_3964
There are no settings; you can use –write-settings

$ gnome-mount –write-settings –mount-options utf8 –device /dev/mmcblk0p1
gnome-mount 0.6
Writing settings for volume
hal udi: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_3961_3964

$ gnome-mount –display-settings –device /dev/mmcblk0p1
gnome-mount 0.6
Displaying settings for volume (overrides drive settings)
hal udi: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_3961_3964
mount option: utf8

This way does not work for all the removable media, because the system idenity the device with HAL UDI. If you put another removable media into your computer, it treat it as another media. You can change the default mount options for all media with vfat file system via gconf. The key name is /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options.

Again, you can config this by CLI commands:

$ gconftool -g /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options
[shortname=lower,uid=]

$ gconftool -s /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options --list-type=string -t list [shortname=lower,uid=,utf8]

$ gconftool -g /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options
[shortname=lower,uid=,utf8]