watch out with those mount point names!

So I am using Ubuntu Hardy more and more, and am quite impressed at how integrated things are. For a long time, Debian has been very well integrated on the command line for servers and things like that, but Ubuntu is really tackling giving all of the myriad apps a standard GUI. GNOME is helping a lot too, of course.

So I just set up a firewire drive to use for development work, and I saw in the Properties panel for the disk, under the Volume tab, I could set the mountpoint name. So I typed out a whole path in the Mount Point: field, /home/hans/code/openembedded, as I usually would when mounting on the command line. Then hit Close, and unmounted and remounted the disk.

When I plugged it back it, I got this obtuse message:

Cannot mount volume.
Unable to mount the volume.
Details
mount_point cannot contain the following characters: newline, G_DIR_SEPARATOR (usually /)

Hmm, WTF? Now what, the disk won’t mount, so I can’t bring up that Properties panel again… arg… hmm…. think, think. Let’s try running gconf-editor from the command line, for any (former?) Windows users, that’s like the Registry Editor. I try Edit -> Find…, type in openembedded, and check the boxes to search both key names and key values. That gives me the setting, where I change /home/hans/code/openembedded to openembedded, and it works! Phew…