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The Ubuntu community has contributed 12357 ideas, 58479 comments, 1187050 votes

Idea #11275: Easily Mount/Unmount disk images from Nautilus



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Written by jhfry the 18 Jul 08 at 13:50. Category: Multimedia.
Related to: Gnome. Status: New
Description
As HDD sizes and bandwidth increase, it is becomming more and more common for users to keep disk images on their machines/networks for easy access rather than maintaining large inventories of CD/DVD media. Unfortunately, mounting these images is still a commandline function requiring SU rights unless the administrator manually configures Fuse.

I have seen many tools and scripts for mounting disk images from within Gnome, however I feel that my solution is the most transparent to the user. It functions very similar to the way OSX works, and is very intuitive.

A while back, I wrote the instructions at the bottom of the page here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ManageDiscImages

These instructions would be fairly easily incorporated into a package (I can only guess as I'm not a developer) that could be made part of the Ubunutu default install.

This would allow any Ubuntu user, reguardless of skill level, perform what up till now required at least minimal experience with the commandline.

Please vote this up!

Attachments
spec Blueprint gnome-mount-disk-image: [Information on this blueprint will be retrieved soon]


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Comments
cheesehead wrote on the 18 Jul 08 at 18:55
Not ambitious enough!

It's the 21st Century, why are we still fiddling around with sudo and mount for CDs and DVDs and ISOs and USB sticks and archives?

Standard desktop install should simply mount an item (safely), recognize it, show the icon on the desktop, unmount and eject it (safely) - all with no user intervention.

To the user, you click on it and it opens or plays or whatever. You don't do passwords or create mount points or install archive managers - the machine needs to do it all in the background for you. It obeys your intent.

jhfry wrote on the 18 Jul 08 at 19:39
Though I agree with you to some extent, all that could be done would be to make these operations transparent to the user... which my solution does.

Follow the instructions in the link... it gives almost what your talking about. The user only needs to right click the .iso and select mount; then they can access the iso like they would any removeable device.

There is no way we will ever get rid of mounting removable devices, you could make it transparent, but it would still be done. And he sudo requirement is actually "a good thing". In the government and corporate sector being able to control who can access removable media is an awesome ability. The fact that it is so easy to control (using group membership and/or sudoers) makes a huge impact when trying to justify Linux over Windows.

cheesehead wrote on the 23 Jul 08 at 01:37
Oops, let me climb down off my kook-mountain. The air gets thin up there....

What I should have said is "I suggest a more ambitious solution where ISOs don't need to be mounted by a right-click. Instead, double-clicking on an ISO should open it like another directory (or play it if it's a media disc). The mounting and unmounting should be invisible to the basic user, and not require admin password."

Also, right-click to mount/unmount (with admin passowrd) is already in Thunar. I use it a lot. And it's great.

Bender2k14 wrote on the 28 Jul 08 at 19:40
@cheesehead

I have to disagree with you. If I double click a disk image, I would expect to be browsing the folders/files within.

Mounting images should be a simple right-click menu option.
+1


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