Can I stop NFS shares appearing in the launcher?

Question

I have about half a dozen NFS shares mapped to my Ubuntu 14.04 box. Each one of them shows up as an icon in the Unity Launcher. This is unnecessary and annoying - they take up a fair bit of space, and in any case I only need them to be visible from Nautilus, which they are.

Right clicking any of them and 'unlock from Launcher' gets rid of all of them. But they come back the next time I log on, or if I remount them, or sometimes seemingly at random.

Is it possible to stop them appearing in the launcher ever?

Running dconf-editor -> com -> canonical -> unity -> devices shows something is blacklisted, and removing an NFS from the launcher appends '-' to it.

Answer 1

This is similar and related to (and perhaps the same as) bug 1103593.

dafreez has suggested a workaround that I think might help you (which I've reproduced here with small spelling/capitalization and formatting tweaks):

I've created a workaround until this is fixed:

Create a text file foo in directory bar with the following script:

#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]
do
 gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Devices blacklist "['-']"
 sleep 1
done

Make it executable.

Run crontab -e from terminal.

Add a line as follows:

@reboot /path/to/bar/foo

If I understand it correctly, this actually automates the dconf changes you found were applied when you manually removed the launcher items. A variety of circumstances seem to undo the settings blacklisting volumes from being shown in the launcher--this script re-blacklists them every second.

This is not specific to NFS shares, so if you use icons for other volumes (such as local ones) often, you might be inconvenienced. But if you don't rely heavily on that behavior, you should be fine--they should still be accessible in Nautilus (the file browser).