I reinstalled the ThinkPad with Ubuntu 8.10, and I've had to get a few things going again on there. As slick as Ubuntu has been with most things, I was expecting to be able to browse my way to my NFS shares in the house, or failing that, I'd be able to go to "nfs://nas/..." and be in business. That's not the case, so I had to set up a bit for myself.

Using my previous Debian experience, I knew that autofs is a pretty friendly way to get filesystems mountable by normal users. It automatically mounts a filesystem when a user first requests it, then unmounts it later when it's been idle.

I installed autofs5, nfs-common, etc from aptitude. Then I uncommented the /net line in /etc/auto.master, and restarted autofs. At this point, I could just cd into /net/nas, and autofs would get it mounted for me, even as a user.

To make it easy from Gnome, I created a Custom Launcher on the Panel for the "Location", file:///net/nas/, and it becomes easily clickable to open it.