As I’ve written about before I’ve written a .fdi file for my iPod for using with hald on FC3. My .fdi file fixes a few things that hald does by default. To find out more, just read that post!

Anyway, I just wanted to drop a note that I figured out last night how to specify any arbitrary mount option. I suppose it was possible all along, but last time I went down this trail, my brain was getting fried and thought only the mount options I saw in examples were possible. It turns out you can do any mount option as long as you specifiy it as a bool and set it true or false. You can also turn off default ones.

For some reason, for vfat filesystems, hald‘s default .fdis are set up to mount fat as UTF-8 by using the mount option of iocharset=utf8. This was causing some problems with gtkpod, so I wanted to remove that. Looking at some examples, I deceided to finally try specifing this in my iPod.fdi:

<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.iocharset=utf8" type="bool">false</merge>

This worked, so I thought I’d try some other mount options I would have liked, but couldn’t figure out how to get going my last go around with the iPod.

<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.shortname=win95" type="bool">true</merge>
<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.noatime" type="bool">true</merge>

Those also worked. It looks like you can put anything after volume.policy.mount_option. as long as you specify the full option and set it to true.

If you want to recreate what I’ve done, take my .fdi from the previous post add the above lines to it for the second parition on the iPod and you two can get fstab-sync to create an fstab entry that looks like this:

/dev/sda2 /media/iPod vfat pamconsole,exec,noauto,noatime,shortname=win95,sync,managed 0 0