Re: mounting/unmounting devices for newbies

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

>what with mounting/unmounting drives, I am wondering how people expect
>newbies to use removeable disks? As I see it, this is the major reason
>that my mom couldn't use Gnome/Linux. I think that for most things,
>window's way of dealing with disks makes a lot of sense if you don't
>understand what's going on underneith. To the user, the fact that the
>floppy/zip/cd is in the drive should mean that the computer sees it.

[I'm not sure if this is really a Gnome issue, but it's certainly a "make
Unix friendly" issue, so I think it has a place on this list. Let me know if
I'm spamming]

 AFAIK all removable media drives other than PC floppy drives can tell when a 
disk is inserted or the eject button is pressed, so in theory the disk can be 
automatically mounted or unmounted. This would require the device drivers to 
notify the automounting tool of any disk change events, and the automounting 
tool to mount new disks, or when the eject button is pressed, unmount the disk 
and tell the drivers when it's safe to eject it. This would be a Good Thing.

 PC floppy drives are the exception, because they have a mechanical eject 
button. I can't see any way of detecting disk changes, other than keeping the 
drive spinning all the time, which is very ugly. The alternative is not to 
mount floppies at all, but then you have to use special methods (like the 
mtools package) for dealing with files on floppies, you can't "cd" to a 
directory on a floppy, floppies will have to be treated specially by file 
selectors, etc etc. This is even uglier.

 Users can get used to mounting removable disks, but it would be nice to have 
everything automounted. Automounting everything except floppies is confusing
and inconsistent, so floppy drives are stopping a generally useful feature 
from being used. Does anyone know of a way to automount floppies or detect 
disk changes on floppy drives?



 - Michael Rogers