Re: question about Unmount/Eject on removable media menus

["Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps verizon net>]

Thanks for the information.

Two questions (below).

On 05/17/2009 11:50 AM, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 06:36 -0400, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote
[...]
> Typical examples of devices that report removable media
>
>    1. actual devices with removable media: optical drives, floppy drives,
>       USB card readers, PCCard/Expresscard card readers, ZIP/Jaz drives
>
>    2. virtually all USB sticks
>    
Why would a USB stick report "ejectable"?  This is what I don't understand.
>    3. consumer electronics like iPod and Kindle and MP3 players
>
> So for the devices in categories 1. through 3., the user experience is
> that if you press the Eject icon in Nautilus, the volume will disappear
> from the volume sidebar and the device will report "Safe to disconnect
> to the device" or, if capable of physically ejecting the media (optical
> drives and Zip drives only), eject the media. If you don't like this,
> you can right click on the icon and select "Unmount" instead.
>
> Typical examples of devices that report not having removable media
>
>   4. USB and Firewire hard disk enclosures
>    
These seem somehow to be the same as a USB stick as far as unmount and 
eject go.
>   5. SATA and SCSI disks (typically the built-in disk)
>
>   6. Built-in SD card readers (the card itself is the device, not the
>      media)
>
> and for these you will only get the "Unmount" option. Pressing the eject
> icon in the Nautilus sidebar will not make the volume disappear (but the
> eject icon will indeed disappear to signify the device is not mounted).
>
> The above is pretty much the experience we want; in particular it means
> that consumer electronics like Kindle- and iPod-ish devices will Just
> Work(tm) without the need for any quirks/whitelists.
>
>        David
>    

What about drives in removable bays?  What got me into this entire area 
was trying to figure out how to best handle the removal of a bay that 
has a disk in it.  This bay (Lenovo Ultrabay) is actually quite nice as 
it has a pre-eject signal, which can be used to get the device ready for 
physical removal.  However, in Fedora (and most other distributions) 
nothing gets hooked to this signal.  I was hoping that there would be 
something built-in that would do an "eject", i.e., unmount all 
partitions and turn off the disk (and maybe the bay as well).

peter