Re: CD ROM and Floppy icons won't disappear

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

George Farris <george gmsys com> writes:

> You know one thing that something like magidev **really** needs to
> handle is the floppy drive.  I have labs full of Linux with RH-6.2 on it
> and the one thing that comes up over and over again is how absolutely
> brain dead the floppy disk handling is in Linux when your trying to use
> it as a desktop OS.  I really had thought Redhat would have figured this
> one out by now but....
> 
> You just can't ask a user coming from the Windows would to mount and
> unmount floppy disks.  They don't like it.  Heck I don't even like it
> and I've been using Unix for over 10 years.  It's good to have on the
> server but not on the desktop.

We tried making magicdev handle the floppy, but there is no
way of polling a PC floppy drive without simply checking it 
periodically which ends up starting the drive motor.

[ Revealing myself as one of the people behind magicdev
  and thus opening myself up for revilement ]

So, if you wanted all your floppy drives to go 
"chuff, <wait> chuff, <wait> chuff..." for all of eternity,
we could do it, but not otherwise. 

You might want to look at automount/supermount. What they do
is try to mount the drive upon access. They aren't terribly
reliable though in my experience.

In GNOME it isn't bad - you right click on the floppy and
select "Mount"; a little note taped to the side of the computer
telling people to do this probably would save at least some
of the questions.

Regards,
                                        Owen