Re: CD ROM and Floppy icons won't disappear

[Sean Middleditch <sean middleditch iname com>]

Owen Taylor wrote:

> 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.
>

Supermount works perfectly fine for me.  The only problem I ever have are
programs like GNOME's old CD mount applet that wound't let me eject any time
I want... or GRIP, which still doesn't realize I've put in a different CD if
I stop playing, eject, put in a CD, and hit play.

Obviously there is a solution that works perfectly, or Windows wouldn't work
so well this way.  There just needs to be a push by the kernel hackers to get
it done, or perhaps just clean up Supermount a bit.  They're the ones that
are making this lag so much, because they're working on things like a kernel
module for web page serving (Which I still see, no matter, as a really
pointless idea) instead of automatic drive mounting/unmounting.

>
> 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
>
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