Mount Tool [was Re: [Usability] Some usability feedback]

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004, Jamie McCracken wrote:

> Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 12:51:02 +0000
> From: Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>
> To: Maurizio Colucci <seguso forever tin it>
> Cc: Gnome UI <usability gnome org>
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Some usability feedback
>
> On Sat, 2004-11-27 at 13:33 +0100, Maurizio Colucci wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > Yesterday I had my cousin try Gnome2.8 (Ubuntu). He is a windows XP user
> > who only uses its system for word processing and multimedia. Age 35.
> > Profession: university professor (law).

Very good of you to provide this kind of feedback.  I've seen it before
but it is remarkable how inflexible otherwise intelligent people can be
when not working in an area that interests them.  I expect your cousin is
required to learn about new legislation all the time but seems to have
only learned enough about computers to get by.

(Please dont take this as a criticism, I'm just as bad in areas that do
not interst me.  It depends on his personality but if you show him a few
examples of things he can learn to save time in the long run it might be
possible to get him to help himself)

> > - Initially, he could not locate his windows partitions. He complained
> > there is no graphical representation of them. (But I suspect this is an
> > ubuntu problem, since in fedora I recall the disk were there.)
> > Furthermore, they were not mounted automatically, and I found no
> > graphical tool to do that. I had to launch parted and edit fstab, which
> > he didn't like.
>
> That would be a handy application to have

Red Hat included a mount tool and it pains me that I was ever forced to
use it (upgraded to Fedora 3 recently and I dont think I have had to
manually mount a disk yet, so things are looking good but still not
great).  I do not _ever_ want to manually mount a disk, and it is painful
that Gnome failed in this respect for so long as it was something the
Apple Macintosh was I was able to do eons ago.  What pains me even more
about the mount tool was that it was only for removable disks (floppy
disks, cd-roms) unlike the mount tool in BeOS which provided a relatively
simple way to mount windows partitions.  My point is that this tool
already exists and is very similar to what you seem to want.

I think Ubuntu should really have mounted the drives for you automatically
(at least as read only) but as a relatively new distribution on their
first major release they might have overlooked some details.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan