GNOME in a read only environment.

[Vidar Braut Haarr <vhaarr gmail com>]

Hi,

I recently had some problems with one of my HDDs (which happens to be
the one with / and /home on it), and after a while the Linux kernel
would remount it to read only mode.

I can cope with that until I get a new HDD, that's fine. GNOME,
however, can not. The first thing I wanted to do was to start
'gnome-system-log' - no dice. Refuses to start if the system is read
only. Second was 'gnome-terminal' - same result.

In fact, I don't think I've found any applications (even 'sudo' has
problems, and I get spammed with tons of postfix messages in the tty)
that start in a read only system, and I do not understand why they
wouldn't.

I think it is /essential/ that at least 'gnome-system-log' and
'gnome-terminal' would be able to start in this particular setting ...

If noone disagrees with me, I'd like to file bugs on these two at
least. It would of course be best if all GNOME applications worked in
read only mode, since I see no reason why they should not, but I
realise that this is too high a goal.

Maybe gnome-vfs should also pop up a notification in the notification
area saying "Your hard disk has been configured as read only by the
system due to an error. Please note that you will not be able to save
any data." or something along those lines.

(please note that I'm not subscribed to desktop-devel-list, so please
CC me on any replies, thank you.)

--
Vidar Braut Haarr
"Programmers don't die, they
just GOSUB without RETURN."