Re: Device (un)mount applet

[John Ellis <johne bellatlantic net>]

Bruno Widmann writes:
>On Fri, 22 May 1998, John Ellis wrote:
>> Is there any program or function in gnome to easily mount and unmount
>> devices such as cd-roms, floppys, Zip disks, etc? 
>
>We could add this to the new diskusage-applet. So you could right click on
>it, and there would be submenu mount, with all the entrys in fstab which
>aren't mounted now.

It would be nice to show both unmounted and mounted devices, with the
option of unmounting those that are already mounted. The diskusage-applet
is handy, but I believe there should be an additional applet for mounting as
well. An icon to show/change the status of a mounted device can be made
very small, for instance an applet the size of the modemlights applet should
be sufficient.

>> Is anyone working on such a feature? If not I could start writing
>> such a facility myself. My idea is to have a panel applet that could be
>> configured to mount a directory (like /mnt/cdrom) using the mount
>> command. To keep it simple, an entry must be in /etc/fstab so
>> a command such as 'mount /mnt/cdrom' would work. This makes
>> it easy to specify which device is controlled by the applet (just
>> select properties and type in the mount location). This applet
>> would support multiple instances in the panel (one for each device).
>> And the Icon would change to reflect the device's mount status.
>> 
>
>not bad either ... I haven't looked at the multiple-instances stuff yet,
>so i can't comment to much on that. Can you have sepparate config file for
>each of the multiple-instances?

Each instance of any applet keeps it's configuration between sessions under
an individual applet_id assigned by the panel, so it already works. I believe the
problem with multiple instances is the memory consumed by each instance.
Imagine a system with 2 cd-roms, 2 floppy drives, and a zipdrive. Memory used
by running an applet 5 times is a waste. Running one applet process should allow
five icons on the panel.
I recall reading that the clock applet is being readied to attempt this with multiple
timezones.

Then theres the problem where if you remove an applet from the panel and add
back, all your preferences are lost.

>> Or perhaps the file manager should contain this functionality.
>> 
>definitely should, if it doesn't allready.

I found code for getting a list of mounted devices in gmc, but no code for doing
the (un)mounting. (but then again, all I did was grep around for "mount")

--
John Ellis <gqview@geocities.com>
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Haven/5235/