Ubuntu (8.10) Error and Fix

Well, last night (at about 1am) I was working on a new website when I realized I needed upload a whole boatload of pictures.  I’m currently running dual boot Ubuntu 8.10 and Vista; however, I spend most of my time in Ubuntu.  Great…this is a good job for rsync.  Well, the directory had a mix of stuff in it, so I spent an hour of so futzing around trying to get the pattern include/exclude working right (I ended up and just dumped my patters into a file and told rsync to look there).

But, I get getting this error that I thought was related to having a space in the volume name (why oh why do people…and companies…insist on using a space in a filename.  ARG.  Just don’t do it).  I tried to change the volume label thinking that would be the easy way (ubuntu mounts media to /media/<volume_name>).  Nope…couldn’t do that; however, I did find an argument int he properties called Mount Point.  Great.  I just entered where I wanted it mounted (a complete path…like /media/<where_I_want_it>).  Unmounted and tried to remount it.  Uh oh…error time:

“Cannot mount volume. Unable to mount volume” . When clicking details the message “mount_point cannot contain the following characters: newline, G_DIR_SEPERATOR (usually /)”

Arg.  What’d I do wrong?  Why do things like this always happen in the middle of the night when I want to go to bed?  ARG!  I googled around and found this bug report on the Ubuntu website talking about the same error. Awesome!  Something to look at!

Well, I figure that “/system/storage/volumes/_org_freedesktop_Hal_devices_voume_uuid_*/mount_point” has to be a config file (isn’t everything in Linux?)  Uh oh.  Can’t find /system on the filesystem.  Arg.  Oh wait…if I’d read more of the post, I’d see I need to use this special program because it is a registry type thing (gconf-editor).  No sweat.  I go to the command line and try torun it.  No luck…command not found.  ARG!

By this time it’s about 2 am and I just want to go to bed.  But I can’t because I’ve got this stupid error to fix.  No sweat.  I go to install the app (Applications/Add/Remove) only to find it is installed.  ARG.  I go looking though the program list to try to find it.  Nothing.  ARG ARG.

Back to google.  I finally figure out that to launch gconf-editor, I have to hit <alt> + <f2> and enter gconf-editor in the popup.  That works.  I locate the key, make the change and everything is fine (the whole problem stems from the fact that the mount point properties option exoects you to enter a name…not a path…just a name.)

Now, to get back to my original problem. Rsync works now (it wasn’t reading the space right).  I start the files uploading and go to bed.

Image by andrew mason