Re: Nautilus unmount volume, also power-off?

["Diego Escalante Urrelo" <diegoe gnome org>]

Hey

On 2/4/08, Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Currently Nautilus offers the option to either unmount or eject (if
> suitable) a volume, such as an external USB harddisk or flash drive.
>
> There has been discussion in user forums if it is possible to power off
> those external storage devices as well,
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?mode=hybrid&t=451344
> http://www.techteam.gr/index.php?showtopic=118719
>
> A way to implement the "unmount+poweroff" in Nautilus is to create a
> Nautilus action that calls "umount", then "sdparm --command=stop", and
> there is such a script circulating the forums.
>
> Here is what I have in mind in implementing this
> a. An external device can have several partitions. A power-off must be
> attempted only when all partitions have been unmounted. Currently, the
> UI does not offer yet an option of the sort "You have 4 partitions
> mounted, shall I unmount them all?" but this can be done latter.
> b. The user should not be confronted with information on "power-off"; a
> power-off should be attempted when the last partition of a device has
> been unmounted. That appears to be the case in Win/OSX.
> c. Sending the STOP command appears not to work for some external USB
> devices. I think it should be ok to try it anyway after the last umount
> of a partition.
> An alternative to sdparm is "sg_start --stop /dev/sdX".
> d. Sending STOP to a flash drive can switch off the indicator light,
> which is nice feedback to the user that they can unplug.

You just solved one of the mysteries in my friend's linux desktop.
Nice idea btw. :P

Greetings