Re: Device (un)mount applet

[Zack Williams <zdw u arizona edu>]

> What about the people that don't want to use an applet such as the
> diskusage-applet? I personally don't need such an applet, and don't want
> to run it just to get some functionality on my system that can be provided by
> one that is smaller (less screen real estate). Plus I don't think a newbie is going
> to relate disk-usage to mounting of drives, even less if the function is buried
> under a menu you have to right click. An Icon that looks like a floppy drive
> is much better suited to a newbie, and once they learn the system, let them
> decide if they want to continue using the applet.

<out of lurk>

I agree with this. IMHO, the best way to do this is to have, in the root window, icons for
the root (/) directory, the personal (~) directory, and the contents of /mnt. When the
user clicks on an unmounted drive to try and open it, gnome first tries to mount it
and then opens the directory. If it cannot do this, it puts up an alert that describes
the problem (incorrect access privledges, incorect fs type, etc.) and gives the user
some options (change the fs type, switch to root to mount drive, etc.). When the user is
done using the drive, he/she right clicks on the drive icon (which is different in its 
mounted and unmounted states), and selects "eject" or some other appropriate command, and
gnome unmounts the drive. I also seem to remember some utilities floating around that 
allow the physical ejection of Zip disks, CDROM drives, and Sparc floppies - it would be 
a very good idea to use these. We also should probably run fsck against any new media
at mount time, in order not to munge the data and fs. The tooltips on the drive icons
should give pertinent drive information (% full, fs type, number of files, disk name, etc.)

Any thoughts on automounting drives? A common feature on both MacOS and Windows is that 
when you insert a CD into the drive it gets mounted and autoruns a certain file on
the CD. The autorun idea is very insecure but for some things, like installation CD's,
it may be a good idea. Also, when you insert Audio CD's into a drive, they autoplay on
many systems, or they load the CD player app. The downside of all of this is that it 
usually is done by polling the devices, which is often a waste of CPU resources

One problem though. If any users come from a windows background, they are not used to 
having to unmount the floppy drive to eject it. Of course this is not a problem with 
hardware that has mechanical eject support (like macs and some sparcs)

<back into lurk>

Zack

-- 
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# Zack Williams  zdw@u.arizona.edu  http://www.u.arizona.edu/~zdw #
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