GNOME automount requires nautilus to be running

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Unfortunately I think not.

You can use udev to do this. I'm not an expert on udev, but I pieced a configuration together from:

http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html

Here's a rough sketch of what I did. No warranty; use your own common sense, etc.

Plug in your device.

ls /dev/disks/by-uuid

Add to /etc/fstab:

  UUID=<disk uuid> /media/my-device vfat user 0 0

/sbin/udevadm info -a -p /sys/block/sdc

Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/my.rules:

  SUBSYSTEM=="block", ATTRS{model}=="<model string>", RUN+="/usr/local/bin/mount-my-device"

Create /usr/local/bin/mount-my-device:

  /bin/mount /media/my-device

With karmic this problem can be easily solved by unchecking a newly added gconf-key:

/apps/nautilus/preferences/exit_with_last_window

"If set to true, then Nautilus will exit when all windows are destroyed. This is the default setting. If set to false, it can be started without any window, so nautilus can serve as a daemon to monitor media automount, or similar tasks. "

So, in addition to unchecking the show_desktop key, uncheck exit_with_last_window key too and you'll have a desktop without icons and automounting will still work.

Or put this in /usr/local/bin/mount-my-device instead, if you want to modify the filesystem without a lot of sudoing:

  /bin/su -c "/bin/mount /media/my-device" <your username>