Wayne D's Blog

As I mentioned before the upgrade to Centos 5 broke autorun on removable media (CD's, DVD's and USB drives). If you get a permission denied error when you try to run something on removable media and the file has exec permissions set then you have this problem. This functionality is supposed to protect you and I from the dangerous behaviour of running things off of removable media, I just find it irritating. You can re enable this functionality either on a per user basis or system wide. This change affects the behaviour of gnome-mount so if you run KDE you need to find another solution. On a per user basis run gconf-editor and go to the key /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options for USB drives or /system/storage/default_options/iso9660/mount_options for CD's or DVD's, and add exec to the list of options. Every time I run gconf-editor I'm reminded running regedit in Windows and it doesn't evoke good memories.

To made the change system wide edit /etc/gconf/schemas/gnome-mount.schemas and add exec to the default options on the mount _options key. See below for an examples for USB and DVD's and CD's. The exact location varies from distro to distro, you can use locate to find gnome-mount.schemas on your particular distro.


From (USB):
<key>/schemas/system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options</key>
<applyto>/system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options</applyto>
<type>list</type>
<list_type>string</list_type>
<default>[shortname=winnt,uid=]</default>
<locale name="C">
<short>Default mount options for vfat fs</short>
to (bold added for emphasis)
<key>/schemas/system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options</key>
<applyto>/system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options</applyto>
<type>list</type>
<list_type>string</list_type>
<default>[shortname=winnt,uid=,exec]</default>
<locale name="C">
<short>Default mount options for vfat fs</short>

From (for CD's and DVD's)
<key>/schemas/system/storage/default_options/iso9660/mount_options</key>
<applyto>/system/storage/default_options/iso9660/mount_options</applyto>
<type>list</type>
<list_type>string</list_type>
<default>[uid=]</default>
<locale name="C">
<short>Default mount options for iso9660 fs</short>
to
<key>/schemas/system/storage/default_options/iso9660/mount_options</key>
<applyto>/system/storage/default_options/iso9660/mount_options</applyto>
<type>list</type>
<list_type>string</list_type>
<default>[uid=,exec]</default>
<locale name="C">
<short>Default mount options for iso9660 fs</short>

After making the changes you need to kill gconfd-2 to get it to reload the default settings.