I'm moving from slackware 13 to slackware 14. Newer version of the (otherwise great) filemanager Thunar now showed all my partitions in the tree, never mind that some are partitions with operating systems on them that I never want to mount. Also, none of the partitions shown in the tree could actually be mounted by clicking on them, even the one's that had valid lines in fstab (the only ones that could be clicked on were the ones already mounted).
Earlier I had researched that I could hide unwanted partitions, but the info that I had saved didn't work. Googling again turned up lots and lots of hits that said the same: make a file in /etc/udev/rules.d/ to make udev hide the partitions. The lines should be like:
KERNEL=="sdb2",ENV{UDISKS_PRESENTATION_HIDE}="1"
Took me a long time to find the one comment with the solution on a page hidden between all the other pages and posts that said the same as above; the commenter Ilia said:
For latest Ubuntu and Fedora you must use UDISKS_IGNORE instead of UDISKS_PRESENTATION_HIDE
Of course Slackware was no different. Hard to find, this fact. Too bad we can't delete all the outdated pages with the wrong info.
So, to be clear, save a file in /etc/udev/rules.d/, for example 99-hide.rules, with lines like:
KERNEL=="sdc2",ENV{UDISKS_IGNORE}="1"
KERNEL=="sdb2",ENV{UDISKS_IGNORE}="1"
So now I learned a bit about udev. There's udevadm as well, and the command udevadm trigger refreshed the display. A command like udevadm info --query=all -n /dev/sdb (use your own device of course, see fdisk -l; both commands need su or sudo) will give you more info then you'd think was possible.
Really surprising: the partitions in the tree that were not mountable before I used the UDISKS_IGNORE rule even though they had lines in fstab, did not disappear, but now became mountable. (Possible bug: sometimes I need to hit the refresh button in the location bar to see the contents.)
Example of a line for simple data in /etc/fstab:
/dev/sdc3 /home/user/mnt/media-foo ext4 noauto,rw,suid,dev,user,noexec 1 2
While this works for me so far, I don't understand everything that's going on and fail to see why it should be so bothersome. It simply is not optimal. You could say problems like above are just the curse of being an end-user, but I don't accept that. I don't use ms-windows for that reason, and whenever Linux is starting to look like ms-windows, I suspect developers have made the wrong choices...
