By default, when connecting an Android device to an Ubuntu computer, gvfs is used via gphoto2 (because gvfs doesn't have native MTP support yet). And that doesn't always work properly.

Here's my experience with this: trying to mount my Android 4.2.1 phone fails most of the time (I've experienced the same behaviour with Android 4.1 too), usually with some "Sorry, could not display all the contents of "Android": Timeout was reached" errors. It does work at times, but it's very slow and with such an unreliable behaviour, an alternative is always nice.

I didn't try mtpfs but it seems that's not reliable any more either, but what I did try is Go-mtpfs and it works great under Ubuntu 12.10: it's fast and it works every time. Well, unless I forget to unlock the phone when I mount it (it's probably something sleep-related because it doesn't always happen), but anyway.

Although partitions created when installing a Linux distribution are automatically mounted on boot, the ones created before the installation need to be mounted manually (unless you manually create a mount point on installation). This can be changed, however, so here is how to mount these partitions automatically.

All the mounted drives (this includes USB drives, NTFS and other partitions that you set to automount, etc. - basically everything that's in /media) show up in the Ubuntu Unity launcher by default which is usually ok if you have a big monitor or if you don't have a lot of applications pinned to the Launcher. 

But if you use a netbook or just want more space on your Unity launcher, here's how to change the launcher behavior so that it doesn't display any mounted drives.

Mounty is a very simple indicator applet you can use to mount CD / DVD images. It supports ISO, IMG, BIN, MDF and NRG and besides mounting, it can also burn the images to a CD/DVD.

Mounty can also remember the mounted images and add it to startup with a single click. It's a very simple but effective little indicator applet.

In the "Ubuntu 10.04 First Time Use Script 0.2 Released: It Now Comes With A GUI" post, it has been suggested in the comments to add an option to automatically mount NTFS drives on startup. The problem was that I didn't know how to do this using the command line, but I finally figured how to do it so I decided to release this as a separate script first. I will of course also add it to the "Ubuntu First Time Use Script" (a new version is coming very soon!).

Here is yet another tip sent to us by reader Mahdi (thanks once again!). This time: how to deactivate password request for mounting partitions in Ubuntu Karmic. Here's what you need to do:

sudo gedit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.devicekit.disks.policy

Furius ISO Mount is a user friendly Gtk+ Interface to Mount ISO, IMG, BIN, MDF and NRG Image files without burning to disk.

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