Re: cdrom

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

[ Set Reply-To to gnome-list, since that is the appropriate forum
  for this. ]

HOEFFNER dcmir med umn edu writes:

> Hi
> 
> I'm running gnome on RedHat6.2 and have a couple of things I'd like
> to ask about.
> 
> First, the cdrom is being a little on the annoying side. I read a
> thread that is now a little over a year old about the icon
> disappearing. Personally, I'd like to have it there all the time,
> just like the floppy and zip drive icons.  If it can't mount when
> you try, fine, let it fail the way the others do. The automount
> feature is handy, and I'm sure my users would prefer it to be
> "justlike a mac" in that respect, but I'd like to see the icon there
> at all times.
> 
> In the archive, it said remove magicdev. If I do this and decide to
> bring it back, does anyone know if all will return to normal or will
> something else go astray and never work the same again?

No need to remove magicdev, just go to the control center:
"CD Properties", and uncheck:

 "Automatically mount CD when inserted"

Of course, you won't get automounting then... 

(The combination of automounting and always having a icon on the
desktop can't be done without modifying gmc. The option could
be added to gmc, but since gmc is being replaced with 
nautilus, it most likely doesn't make any sense at this point.)
 
> Is there a way to get the floppy and zip drives to automount also?

Floppies, no; the hardware doesn't allow telling if there is
disk in the drive without constantly spinning the disk.

Zip drives, should be straightforward to add if there is
a way to tell if there is a device in the drive. The main 
problem I see is the great variety of different Zip disks -
parallel, floppy, IDE, SCSI, USB, etc.
 
> Of greater annoyance is when the cdrom mounts, it adds a few devices to the
> desktop. Seems like it's anything in fstab that's user mountable (Our machines
> have an "exchange" vfat partition that mounts when the user logs into the
> console). I already have an icon for this as a regular directory, but I get
> another looking like a device which will allow the drive to be mounted and
> unmounted (a behaviour I don't want) by the user. This one makes me feel the
> heavy hand of Bill Gates :(  Is this as unavoidable as he is?

Well, hey, you have the sources, so it certainly isn't unavoidable.
Anything can be changed if you care enough and want to spend
the do the programming or pay someone to do it for you.

You'd basically have to go into mc/gnome/gmount.c and make it
able to distinguish between this partition and other user-mountable
devices by some criteria.

> Another thing I'd like to be able to do is have the menu for the zip
> and floppy drives include a format option. It could do the usual
> warnings and all, but it would be nice to have. For instance, all
> the mkfs.* files could generate an option on a submenu. For us, I'd
> like to have the option to format it as vfat so the other side of
> the dual boot could also read them. Of course, ext2 also.

We implemented a menu item for formatting floppies for Red Hat 7.0,
but looking at it, it looks like we forgot to include the file
necessary to actually enable this menu item. :-(

If you grab and install the latest gnome-utils tarball 

[  ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc ; make ; make install ]

Then you should get the floppy option, though that package may not
work without additional upgrades to your system. You might want to
consider upgrading to Red Hat 7.0, or to Ximian GNOME.

Again, adding zip disk support to gfloppy should be straightforward,
if someone has the hardware and wants to do the programming.
(Probably easier than adding it to magicdev actually.)

> If the present release doesn't do what I'm looking for, I'm not
> above hacking this stuff in, though I have to admit I haven't been
> using gnome all that long yet and so would need a little guidance!
> 
> As a completely different suggestion, I'd like to mention the
> omission (at least I don't have it) of gnome-terminal in the man
> pages. I found --help quite by accident. Even a manpage that
> contained that would've been helpful.

Man pages don't exist for most of the GNOME stuff - we've been
doing our documentation as SGML help files. But contributions
of man pages have generally been accepted.

Regards,
                                        Owen