How to automount a gvfs file system on logon

Shell

You could use the mount command in a start up script and put that in the Startup Application Preferences. mount is perfectly capable of mounting remote file systems (if you provided it with the right options and all necessary packages installed).

An alternative to mount in your startup script is gvfs-mount . You can mount nautilus-type URIs with that - just like nautilus does. It is installed by default on most Ubuntu systems.
Example usage:

gvfs-mount 'ftp://[email protected]/folder'

Adding the -u option unmounts the argument, -l lists all mounted file systems, --help gives you more options.

Finally the file /etc/fstab is usually used to mount file systems statically. If your remote server is reliable you might want to take a look at fstab. It will slow down your boot time drastically if the server is slow or offline, but it has the advantage of making the file system available quite soon (before gnome or X are even loaded, e.g. for use in scripts). For more information you can type man fstab.

GUI way

Check out Gigolo . It has the capability of auto-mounting a bookmark, whenever the bookmarked filesystem is present.

sudo apt-get install gigolo   # or use the install link above

Run gigolo. There is an option in the preferences that puts it into autostart and another to activate the tray icon. Check both. Then add your bookmark.

First install gvfs-bin package:

sudo apt-get install gvfs-bin

then mount URI you need. For example:

gvfs-mount 'archive://file%253A%252F%252F%252Ftmp%252Ftest.tar/'

to test it:

ls -la ~/.gvfs/test.tar/

to unmount it, just call:

gvfs-mount -u 'archive://file%253A%252F%252F%252Ftmp%252Ftest.tar/'

Note, that there is no man pages. for this package. To learn more, list available binaries via:

dpkg -L gvfs-bin

and then use --help option, for example:

gvfs-mount --help

I usually do permanent mounts through fstab. You have to enter something like

//servername/folder HOME/remote_server cifs username=XXXX,password=YYYY 0 0

in your /etc/fstab. Since you haven't said anything about what kind of remote partition I gave an example of samba share

See:

• MountWindowsSharesPermanently
• fstab

The second option may be using autofs, see the Ubuntu help wiki page for help.

EDIT: Thank you @con-f-use for reminding me this one. You can add bookmarks from nautilus only. Go to File > Connect to Server... on nautilus and you will be presented with dialogue window where you have the option to add a bookmark of desired name. Just check the add bookmark option and enter the bookmark name. But I think it starts the mounting only after you click the bookmark unlike gigolo.