On 05/18/2009 12:32 PM, David Zeuthen wrote:
[...]
The thing is, there is no reliable way to determine if a device is a USB
disk or a USB enclosure. The device itself will report if it supports
removable media or not (part of the IDENTIFY response) and that's what
we key off.
Yeah, about as reasonable as you can do, I guess. I can gripe as much
as I want, but I won't be able to change poor reporting in manufactured
devices.
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).
It sounds interesting to support this kind of scenario but it has
nothing to do with what we normally refer to as "eject" and I don't
think it would be helpful to overload the term "eject" for this. I think
it would be better to refer to this as "safely remove hardware" and
- have a way in Nautilus (in the sidebar probably) to "safely
remove" things like a drive bay. Probably another option in the
context menu, maybe a "Stop" icon next to the "Eject" icon, I don't
know.
- hook up to whatever event we get and then unmount/eject the device
as appropriate
- maybe have an applet or notification icon for this
If doing this work, we'd probably also want to cover things like docking
stations since they need a similar treatment (and may include disks as
well).
David
Yes, bays and docks are quite similar. In fact, the biggest
difference seems to be between those have have a pre-eject signal and
those that don't. (Maybe there are bays/docks with motorized eject, but
I haven't seen any. (Insert vision of a dock ejecting a laptop like a
toaster ejects a slice of bread.))
Of course, "eject" is already overloaded for things like IPods (I
hear), and in just about this way.
A big problem is to determine when a drive is in a dock/bay. There
doesn't appear to be a reliable way to do this just now.
peter
|
