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.

The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. This article was written on 05/2/07 and tagged with: Ubuntu

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Comments (24)

1. May 13, 2007 10:22 am
   Hervé COSSI

   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.

2. June 15, 2007 4:02 am
   Neilen Marais

   Great, thanks!

   My significant other kept nagging met to get rid of those icons!

3. June 19, 2007 4:44 am
   naser

   Thanks for that tip

4. August 5, 2007 1:34 am
   Rich

   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

5. October 14, 2007 7:58 pm
   Lyn

   Great tip. Thanks for the help.

6. December 27, 2007 8:28 am
   Swede

   Tnx 4 that tip, solved my “problem”

7. February 12, 2008 6:07 pm
   Kevin

   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?

8. April 2, 2008 6:05 am
   Laurence

   Cheers for the tip! Was sick of the clutter

9. April 27, 2008 10:05 am
   rahul

   thanks a lot man. Good tip

10. April 29, 2008 3:39 pm
    Gabriel.

    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.

11. May 1, 2008 8:12 pm
    James

    thanks a ton!

12. May 26, 2008 12:10 am
    matthew

    just the tip i needed, thanks!

13. July 27, 2008 6:00 am
    Jon

    Thanks for sharing. Long time since last i used Gnome.

14. August 17, 2008 9:58 pm
    JMO Mandia

    Thank you so much for this tip! I have been trying to do this for some months now!

15. September 20, 2008 4:48 pm
    Jeff

    Thanks. Just what I needed.

16. October 5, 2008 10:11 am
    Hari Sankar

    Thanks..
    It was very useful

17. October 13, 2008 10:33 am
    Avinash Meetoo

    Hi,

    Thanks for that! I was looking for a solution for ages

    Avinash

18. November 14, 2008 7:20 pm
    greg

    THANKS!! Conky looks so much better with no desktop icons lying around!! great stuff

19. January 2, 2009 9:27 pm
    Rich

    Thanks for the tip. This was something that has always bothered me with ubuntu. Now I have a nice clean desktop again!

20. January 22, 2009 4:56 pm
    Raindog

    Excellent tip. Cheers.

21. March 27, 2009 6:09 pm
    hew

    Thankyou!

22. April 26, 2009 2:44 am
    Giorgio

    thanks!

23. May 16, 2009 1:23 am
    scouser73

    What an excellent tip, I’ve wanted to have a clean & unobtrusive desktop ever since switching to Ubuntu, thank you very much.

24. June 12, 2009 11:03 am
    Robert

    what switch would i have to find to make so everything on my desktop disappears?