How to Manage Mounted/Unmounted File Systems Easily in Ubuntu?

I remember in the past how hard it was with GNU/Linux while trying to mount and un-mounting file systems (especially proprietary ones such as Fat32 and NTFS). The more experienced geeks ;-) like to use the command-line for that since all those disk mounting utilities are installed by default into the OS thus you don't have to manually install a GUI.

But, even if you're a bit "advanced" still by having a GUI tool that uses those command-line utilities makes the whole process a hell lot easier. Although these days GNU/Linux is so good that it just automatically mounts USB devices with ease but still if you're having some troubles with USB pendrive which arrogantly refuses to be mounted + needs to a little tweaking here and there (yikes!), then a utility like "MountManger" can come quite handy.


Main features...

*. As said, this uses the already built in command-line tools thus comes with a huge list of options/features.

A powerful "little" companion ;-)...

*. Supports the following file systems: ext4/3/2, ntfs, swap, fat, reiserfs, iso9660, udf, etc).

*. Mount and Unmount.

*. Change mount points. 

*. Change mounting privileges of the users.

*. Manually set the supported file systems checked through Fsck utility ("0" means no check and 1 means manual scan for errors).

*. Enable/Disable mounted devices link (shortcut) creation, execute binaries, etc.

*. Specify encryption algorithms.

*. Change Umask, read/write features and a lot other advanced options.

*. Change file name encodings.

*. Heck, it can even mount disk images too! (ISO, NRG, MDF, BIN, etc).

*. As mentioned before, includes a USB mounting wizard that lets you easily mount any troublesome USB devices... are just fraction of its features to mention.

You can install MountManager in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 11.10, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the below command in your Terminal window.

sudo apt-get install mountmanager

But please be very careful while accessing some of the advanced file system related settings and if you don't know what you're doing (to be honest, I don't even understand half of the options in it! :/), then please don't change anything.  Although it does let you restore easily to the original settings, but still, think twice before stepping into the "unknown" ;-).


But other than that, if you want to do things like enable/disable read-write permissions or change mount points or even mounting disk image files which are considered as "usual needs" for GNU/Linux users these days, then yes, I do find Mount-Manager to be an extremely useful and powerful little utility (even though Ubuntu come with one but it lack the features of M-M) nonetheless.

Use it with caution!, and good luck.