GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 302038
Replace "Floppy Formatter" with item in Nautilus's File menu
Last modified: 2009-11-09 12:04:51 UTC
Distribution/Version: Ubuntu 5.04 According to Gnome's online help, erasing the contents a floppy disk can be done only by using an item in the shortcut menu for the disk's icon. Unfortunately, this has two problems. 1. HIG: "Since the user may not be aware of their presence, do not provide functions that are only accessible from popup menus unless you are confident that your target users will know how to use popup menus." 2. It doesn't let you erase the disk from its own window. There is a "Floppy Formatter" item in the Applications menu, but this is awkward because it doesn't follow the noun-verb workflow for items in the file manager (first select the item(s), then select what you want to do with it/them). Therefore, I suggest adding an "Erase Disk..." item to Nautilus's "File" menu, enabled when a disk is selected or when the current window is that of a disk. If this was done, "Floppy Formatter" could be removed from the Applications menu.
(I forgot to mention: The wording "Erase Disk..." isn't perfect, but it's more obvious than "Format...", because setting a format is a technical detail of the erasing process rather than the other way round. The Amiga used "Initialize", which was perhaps even more accurate, but also less familiar.)
Thanks for your bug report! The right solution is that the "Floppy Formatter" installs a Nautilus Extension which will display a "Erase Floppy..." menuitem for all floppy items.
sounds like a good idea. it should work for other types of removable (and maybe non removable) disks. for example usb memory sticks, zip disks, compactflash cards. it should work from every instance of the disk icon. the one on the desktop, the one in "computer", the one at the mount point, the one in the places sidebar. it should run with out root priviages. anyone should be able to format a floppy disk at any work station. how ever i dont want some random formating hda. what will happen with a corrupt/unformated disk. this will probably not even mount so how would the user be able to select it anywhere? could we have a "You have inserted an unformated disk (or in a format this computer does not know about). It will need to be formated before it can be used. $STD_WARNING. ok, cancel" will there be a choice of formats. they don't need technical names, maybe "linux ext3", "dos (fat12)", "windows (fat32)", "mac os (HFS)" and a note that linux can read all the formats.
I was about to suggest the same. We can see directly that there is no fs on it when trying to mount it. In this case there should be a popup saying "This device is currently not accessible. Changing that will erase all data on the disk. Do you want to continue?". No need for a menu item (which would rarely be used anyway). The selection of file systems can easily be shortended. We can discover the type of media automatically via hal, so the distinction between fat12/16/32 can be made according to media type since fat12/16 is only useful for small media anyway. So we can make it a decision between "Linux", "Windows" and "MacOS". ext3 should be used only on hard disks. Having a journaled fs on a usb stick sounds rather weird. Stick with ext2 there.
Specifying the format is necessary for the case where you have a device that is currently formatted in ext2/ext3, and now want to use it for sneakernet transfer of files to a computer running an OS that doesn't do ext2/ext3. And a confirmation alert is usually the worst possible design for anything. :-)
Right, I'm not a big fan of dialogs either. But what alternatives are there? Atm, gnome is just whining "I can't access this thing (because: mount output almost nobody understands), do something about it. You'll figure it out, I'm sure." How is the average user going to find out (s)he has to select "format" or "erase disk" to make it work? A dialog is the lesser evil in this case. Besides, it won't show up very often, only if no fs can be detected or the current fs can't be written to. Think of NTFS. And don't forget it will just be an extension to the already existing dialogs. This "I can't read/write it" needs to be shown anyway. We just add a hint about what the user can do about it. The menu item could be there, too. They're not exclusive. A dialog is just a bit easier. And don't get me wrong: I don't want to take out the fs choice, but limit it to some sane defaults. The choice ext/fat needs to be there. But I don't see the point of having a journaling fs on a floppy or fat16 on a 200gb hard drive. So why not leave it out in this case?
The alternative to an alert is text in the listing area of the volume's window explaining that the volume is not in a format <name of distro> can recognize -- just like the text in the message area of a mail client explaining that the selected message has not been downloaded from the server. But that is probably a separate issue from moving the menu item.
What would seem the most familiar behavior for Windows converts is to stick an option "Format disk" in the context menu for any drives that this behavior makes sense for, e.g. floppy, USB stick, memory cards. This could even apply to optical media to prepare discs for packet writing. We should certainly limit the FS choices to be sensible for the given media. I think the issue of not being able to read the FS is a subset of a more general problem of what to do when a device is not usable. The primary other example of this case is when there is no disc/disk in the drive the user tried to mount. We cannot detect this for floppies, but I think HAL can pull the lifting for most other removable devices/media. If a device is detected and has no media inserted the icon should be grayed out. Once a disc is detected as being inserted, it becomes sensitive again. If the medium has a filesystem we can't read for whatever reason, maybe we overlay an exclamation point on the icon. The listing area can have the error information like Matthew suggested. If they try to open the device, we pop up a dialog asking what to do (format, cancel, etc.).
Those are also good ideas, but also don't belong in this bug report. Please report them separately.
thanks for your bug report. GFloppy has been removed from the GNOME Utilities since the 2.28.0 release, and replaced by the GNOME Disk Utility. Nautilus 2.28.0 also has a 'Format' item in the context menu on removable devices.