Why does Ubuntu/linux make it so freaking difficult to do the equivalent of the Windows command "Map Network Drive"?

January 9, 2009 5:08 AM

For the purposes of using Amarok on my laptop, which can not be told that my music folder is located in a shared folder on my media center (as far as I can see), I need to permanently mount the shared music network folder in Ubuntu. They don't make it very easy it seems. Have to use a bunch of comand line editing to get it done? Come on Ubuntu!
posted by Jackie_Treehorn to computers & internet (4 answers total)

just add the mount to /etc/fstab and run "mount -a" if it was not previously connected. You could even create a script you call from the desktop to run the mount -a command.

add this to the end of /etc/fstab, using # sudo vi /etc/fstab or # sudo gedit /etc/fstab

//ntserver/music /mnt/music smbfs username=Jackie_Treehorn,password=smutbusiness 0 0

and if you weren't connected to the local network, and then are and want to re-establish the samba mount, run "mount -a" which mounts everything listed in /etc/fstab. here is a dead simple script you could save in ~Desktop/mount.sh to do this:

#!/bin/bash
mount -a
exit 0


then make sure that the script is executable:

# chmod +x ~Desktop/mount.sh

and then in the future you can just click the icon on your desktop to remount your samba share. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to make an unmount script if you leave your network connection without shutting down the system first.

there may be a nice GUI way of doing this (look at LinNeighborhood, might work, I've never used it.) The command line is your friend.
posted by jrishel at 5:56 AM on January 9, 2009

I don't have my ubuntu machine nearby, but under the Places menu you can choose connect to server... which is the equivalent of Windows- Map network drive.
posted by TuxHeDoh at 8:33 AM on January 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

TuxHeDoh:
I don't have my ubuntu machine nearby, but under the Places menu you can choose connect to server... which is the equivalent of Windows- Map network drive.
The only problem with this solution is that it's not a "real" mount, so there is no way to access it through the shell but only through Gnome/KDE.
posted by sideshow at 9:30 AM on January 9, 2009

@sideshow- GNOME provides gvfs-fuse-daemon, which uses FUSE to make GVFS mounts available to applications that don't use GIO. You can find the FUSE mountpoints in ~/.gvfs
posted by PueExMachina at 11:23 AM on January 9, 2009 [1 favorite]