Where is Nautilus icon file located and how is it chosen?

Question

When I plug my Garmin Nuvi 265 GPS device into my computer via a USB cable, it mounts as a drive with a blue triangle icon instead of the default gray hard drive icon. HOW does Nautilus know how to do this? After much laborious searching, I found that the icon info is stored in ~/.gconf/apps/nautilus/desktop-metadata/GARMIN@46@volume/gconf.xml -- but only when a custom icon is selected.

So

1. Where is this blue icon file?
2. Why does Nautilus use it instead of the plain drive icon?
3. Is there a way to have give each of my drives a custom icon -- so that when I stick in my various flash drives, they have a distinctive icon (i.e. a 'favicon.ico' file on root or such?)

Using Gnome 2.30.2 on Ubuntu 10.04.

Answer 1

Where is this blue icon file?

It is hard to say where that blue icon is located. Most probably your GPS device has that icon and it is configured to show that icon upon autostart.

Why does Nautilus use it instead of the plain drive icon?

Because the device has the necessary icon and configuration file and nautilus is configured to show icon when it finds one.

Is there a way to have give each of my drives a custom icon -- so that when I stick in my various flash drives, they have a distinctive icon (i.e. a 'favicon.ico' file on root or such?)

Yes. You need to create a autorun.inf and the icon to be displayed in the root of the flash drive or internal drive.

The autorun.inf file content should be as follows: I assume the name of the icon is "games.svg".

[autorun]
icon=games.svg

That's it. I've it in Ubuntu 12.04. It should also work on older versions.

Here is a screenshot of my nautilus with custom icon