Re: questions about removable media and desktops

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 04:24:08PM -0400, Matt Brown wrote:
> Question 1: Where should the user go to access removable media.
> 		wrong answer: "point the file manager to /mnt/floppy, etc")
Agreed, maybe icons on the desktop?

> Question 2: Is it possible from a technical point of view, to detect
> 		when removable media is inserted/removed and have a desktop
> 		icon that appears/dissapears where the icon corresponds to
> 		the device?  I think Macintosh does this.

Macintosh does it by careful hardware design, but in practice Linux
can do it too, even on a PC, by probing every few seconds on the devices
that don't report activity, such as old floppy drives.

Mandrake includes a kernel patch that lets removable devices be
ejected even if a file manager has an open window listing their
contents, and although it isn't perfect, it does help a lot (this
is the "supermounter").

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001