Re: Directories/Files

[Sean Middleditch <sean middleditch iname com>]

> Yet ;-)
> 
> We're all here to change that right?

There's OS issues that GNOME can't do much about, I'm afraid.  Things
like mounting drives.  Perhaps if Supermount ever gets stable enough to
be incorporated into Linux, and BSD or Solaris or whatever adopt a
similar approach, things would probably become 20x easier.  That
mounting is perhaps the second most difficult thing to deal with on
UNIX, besides needing to open terminals and type su and then a bunch of
commands to install anything.

> > 
> > However, I'm noticing a few ease-of-use features I think GNOME could
> > benefit from.
> > 
> > 1) File selection.  Everyone knows GNOME file selection is the worst
> > thing there ever was.  It sucks.
> 
> Hopefully the new Gnome-VFS file selector will be better if anyone ever
> gets around to hacking on it. 

Hmm, I'll look at it.  What apps besides nautilus use GNOME-VFS, if any?

> > 
> > 3) Drives and networks.  
> > Perhaps a way to scan /etc/fstab and find all mount points that
> > are of CDROM, floppy, ZIP, etc. format, and adding them to a special
> > list, so in the file selection, you can just click on CD 1, Floppy 2,
> > etc.  Something similar with the network drives would be useful too.
> 
> Nautilus deals with drives a bit. I think it could do with a bit of 
> massaging, but its getting there. Network drives live in Gnome-VFS. Unlike
> the Windows and traditional UNIX models there is no need to `mount' network
> drives. There is currently WebDAV and FTP support, and SMB support seems to
> be coming along nicely ;-)

That's cool.  One problem I've noticed is that on my distro, only root
can mount/umount SMB shares, so even after I hacked Gnomba to make it
actually work (it wasn't using the right arguments to smbmount), I had
to mess around with stuff to be able to mount shares.  I still can't
umount them without giving someone access to umount ANY SMB share.

How will Nautilus deal with this?

> 
> Ian