I'm using GNOME in gutsy beta and I have a USB SD card reader that remains plugged into a USB port while various SD cards are plugged in and taken out of it. I decided to set the mount to synchronous in case I forget to unmount before removing a volume, by entering the "sync" drive mount option into its properties in nautilus. That resulted in every SD I inserted after that being owned by root and not allowing me to write. If I take the sync option out and reinsert the card the behaviour reverts to normal.
As I see it, setting the "sync" option should not influence the other mount options, it should just make the mount synchronous, in addition to whatever it was before.
I found this workaround:
*with the card inserted, open terminal and run "mount | grep sda"
*Copy each mount option displayed to the drive mount options (I used gconf-editor for this step)
*add sync to that list of drive mount options
*reinsert the card (after doing an unmount)
However, I'm not happy with this, as it means that changes to the default mount options (say, hypothetically, a "flush" option in hardy) won't be carried over to this drive should they change. Also, it's a pain to set this up for each cardreader to be plugged into the system. I haven't tested this with a USB key, but it's worth investigating whether the behaviour carries over.
Is this still an issue in hardy?