GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 44970
consider mount/automount issues
Last modified: 2006-03-09 23:16:48 UTC
Currently if a user wants to view the contents of a floppy disk or other removeable media, they must do the following: Right click on desktop, navigate to disks menu, click on floppy, click on the icon that appears on the desktop. It would seem easier to have an icon for the drive already on the desktop, so that clicking on it mounts and opens. The problem with this is that the user may try to click on the icon when there is no disk in the drive. In this case a message would would have to be displayed asking to either insert a disk or cancel. If the icon could change to indicate whether the disk is mounted or not, this could prevent some confusion. ------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2000-12-05 12:33:03 ---- It's a good idea if we want to revisit this design. For now, though, we're just trying to fix the bugs. Redesign has to wait for post 1.0 unless it's absolutely required. ------- Additional Comments From gzr@eazel.com 2000-12-05 14:05:49 ---- I personally would never design a system that display an icon for a device that is not present. This is like the broken system under Windows. On windows you click on a floppy icon and the drive churns and you get an error if no media is in the drive. The right click menu was the least lame answer I could come up with. ------- Additional Comments From daemonc@netscape.net 2000-12-05 17:23:32 ---- I understand that having the same icon for a drive when there is no disk in it causes some confusion. But what about an icon that changes when mounted, as in a special emblem, change from grayed out, or something? As for the drive churning when there is no media in the drive, this is no different from what happens if you select it from the disks menu. And, as we can see in bug 44951, the disks menu is misleading, in that when the user selects an empty drive they receive no feedback telling them why it could not be mounted. I am not saying that this needs to be done now, or ever, but it might be something to consider for the future. ------- Additional Comments From apost@cbmi.upmc.edu 2000-12-06 21:34:07 ---- Have you looked at Redhat's magicdev? It's designed to work with gmc and makes cdrom handling like the Mac. It scans for inserted cdroms and pops an icon up on the desktop when it finds one. If you right-click on the icon and select eject, the cd is ejected and the icon disappears. A brief perusal of the code looks like it could be made to work with LS120s, zip drives, etc. The only PC drives I'm aware of that couldn't work with this mechanism would be the standard floppies. The same seems to go for Sparc machines. Would it be a major faux pas to have entries for drives that have to be dealt with manually in the right-click menu, and let magicdev take care of the rest? Maybe Linux could show PC users how much better the Mac way of drive handling is, and force PC manufacturers to put floppy drives without software ejection out to pasture! On another note, will Nautilus contain a feature for formatting disks? Most linux distros only have GUIs for 3.5" floppy formatting. It seems essential that the same GUI be able to format LS-120s, zip drives, tape drives, and other removable media. ------- Additional Comments From gzr@eazel.com 2000-12-06 21:56:18 ---- The nautilus desktop places icons on the desktop for removable volumes like CDROMS. I have looked at magicdev and what we do is much better. If a CD is not showing up on the desktop when inserted than you hav efound a bug. ------- Additional Comments From daemonc@netscape.net 2000-12-07 02:15:53 ---- Hold on. 1. magicdev is a daemon that runs in the background. It does not depend on gmc in any way. It depends on Gnome because it is controlled from a capplet and uses corba to start the CD player. 2. I just talked to diskzero who says that nautilus doesn't and shouldn't do any automounting stuff. Nautilus keeps track of /etc/mtab and displays an icon when something is mounted. Nautilus should work fine with magicdev. 3. Nautilus is trying to do something else with the cdrom, which makes it impossible to mount when magicdev is running. see bug 45022. 4. whatever Nautilus is doing is not working, because even when magicdev is not running, the CD is not mounted and does not show up on the desktop when inserted as you say. I believe the bug is that Nautilus is trying to do something it shouldn't. Correct me if I'm wrong. ------- Additional Comments From daemonc@netscape.net 2000-12-07 03:22:00 ---- I've gone too long without sleep and I'm an idiot. Apologies to gzr@eazel.com , I did not realize you were the same diskzero I talked to. So now I'm really confused. Is nautilus trying to automatically mount the CD when it's inserted? Is this something nautilus should do, or should it handled by an external daemon? As for what this bug was originally about, I've come to the conclusion that the disks menu, in conjunction with a good automounter is a better interface. ------- Additional Comments From apost@cbmi.upmc.edu 2000-12-11 20:21:05 ---- Well, I guess I have found a bug. No icon appears when I insert a CD-ROM into the drive, nor when I mount it. Furthermore, the 'Disks' submenu has no entries. I'm running this on a Dell laptop with a media bay for the floppy and the CD-ROM. The CD-ROM is on /dev/hdc, and has /mnt/cdrom as its mount point. The CD-ROM drive has an entry in /etc/fstab. I'm running Mandrake 7.1, BTW. ------- Additional Comments From eli@eazel.com 2001-02-09 11:28:25 ---- Duane is now the proud owner for Desktop QA. ------- Additional Comments From eli@eazel.com 2001-03-26 11:19:36 ---- SPAAAAAAAAAM! (Jon Allen has taken these components; QA Assigning bugs to him.) ------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 20:48 -------
*** Bug 45412 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 86597 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
So... there are a number of issues here that we should probably consider in the near future. *Is the right-click menu for disks intuitive/useful? It's certainly not terribly HIG friendly ATM. If we take it away, how do we provide that interface? *Should icons automatically show up on the desktop for removeable media? Should that be optional (as requested in bug 86597)? *What about unmount? It seems that there are a number of issues here that the usability team should look at; probably not for the 2.2 timeframe but definitely something to think about for 2.4.
Three comments on this one: The disks menu is much more useful than typing it in on the commandline. While I agree there might be better ways to do it, please don't go for a stopgap solution that throws it out. Whatever the solution, please make sure to have it accessable directly from nautilus, rather than only from the desktop. :) it's annoying having to minimize 20 windows just to right click on the desktop, and at that point I may as well have just typed mount foo on the commandline. One of the annoyances for me with the current solution is it's apparent lack of "reliability", in that often times I'll forget to close/move out of all the windows that are looking at /mnt/cdrom, and I end up getting fustrated. FAM is also problematic here, as it tends to keep monitoring the disk even when the user no longer cares. A way to more effectively deal with this would be nice (a list of what's got it open, a way of "forcing" the unmount, esp. with read-only disks where we don't care). Some things to keep in mind...
> it's annoying > having to minimize 20 windows just to right click on the > desktop, and at that point I may as well have just > typed mount foo on the commandline. Isn't that what Ctrl-Alt-D is for? :)
Marking down pri.
*** Bug 120297 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
We use g-v-m now. Marking obsolete.