Hide Removable Drive Icons from Your Ubuntu Desktop
I prefer a clean desktop with no icons cluttering it up, but by default Ubuntu adds icons to the desktop for every single removable drive that you attach to your system.
Having recently transitioned to using Ubuntu full-time at home (instead of just part-time), this was one of the first things I wanted to disable. Sadly there's no option in the default configuration screens, so we'll have to use the "registry editor" for Ubuntu, called gconf-editor.
Just type in gconf-editor into the Alt+F2 run dialog to open the app.
Now browse down to the following key:
apps \ nautilus \ desktop
You should see a key in the right-hand pane called volumes_visible. Remove the checkbox from it, and the icons will instantly disappear from the desktop. Remember that you can always access the drives from the "Computer" icon, or easily in the file browser.
I'm much happier now with my beautiful desktop.
Very useful,
As you, i prefer a clean desktop with no icons cluttering it up and this was disturbing me since i've been using ubuntu. Thx for the tip.
Great, thanks!
My significant other kept nagging met to get rid of those icons!
Thanks for that tip
Hi
How do I get to see the partitions on the desk top icons? All the partitions are mounted and the default settings indicate that all the partitions are mounted but they are not visible anywhere. How can I make them visible?
Rich
Great tip. Thanks for the help.
Tnx 4 that tip, solved my "problem"
It's really useful tip however this only hides icons of mounted devices but doesn't unmount them. Along with them it hides icons of temporarily mounted CD/DVD, flash, floppy.
From my point of view it's much better to unmount drives that are currently not in use.
I have slave drive (fat16,ntfs,fat32) with XP +bunch of pro programs just in case and I use it now very seldom:). But I can unmount those partitions only from console and they appear again on next logon. On the other hand I can mount/umount another fat32 docs partition on masterdrive as well as partitions hosted another Linux distros with just right click in FileManager.
Anybody knows what file I need to edit to manage those slave partitions same way?
Cheers for the tip! Was sick of the clutter
thanks a lot man. Good tip
Great tip! Just a note for those wanting to get rid of permanent mount points (e.g. partitions) from the desktop… If you mount your drives to /mnt instead of /media they won't appear on the desktop.
thanks a ton!