Alternative way to handle hard drives & partitions in Ubuntu

Just got Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 installed. I like the following behaviour to be applied to my hard drive partitions and mass storage devices – pen drives, USB disks: Automount all partitions of internal hard disk – without using fstab: In /etc/hal/fdi/policy/preferences.fdi <merge key=”storage.automount_enabled_hint” type=”bool”>false</merge> false -> true No hard drive icons displayed on desktop: In [...]