GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 337598
Unmount for cd-rom
Last modified: 2012-08-13 23:30:38 UTC
There is no unmount cd-rom option in nautilus and disk mount applet. I find this limitting. Tere are some cases where you would like only to unmount the cdrom, but not eject it. An example is using cd-rom in some virtual machine like qemu after watching it's contents in nautilus, or adding another session with your burner, etc.. My suggestion is to add "unmount" option for cd-rom in nautilus context menu, and mount drive applet.
*BUMP* Same here, GNOME 2.16.x. Suppose I want to erase a CD-RW and burn something new onto it. I insert the CD, HAL/g-v-m/nautilus automatically mount it, and it shows up in computer:/// and the nautilus sidebar drive list thing. So far, so good. The problem now is, however, that erasing the CD doesn't work as long as it is still mounted, of course. The only option that nautilus provides on right-click is to eject the CD, but not to simply unmount it. I have to use the command line for that - not very user friendly. :-/ The only workaround is to disable automounting for CDs completely via Settings -> Desktop -> Removable Drives and Media, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of having automounting integrated into the desktop in the first place.
The enclosed patch against nautilus-2.16.3 implements having both eject _and_ unmount available in the right-click popup menu for volumes and drives that are affected by the reported limitation (GNOME_VFS_DEVICE_TYPE_{CDROM,ZIP,JAZ}). Note that if you're using HAL (which you probably are), you'll also need an appropriate .fdi that sets the "storage.requires_eject" property to "false" (its default value is "true" for the affected drives), otherwise gnome_vfs_volume_unmount() will still eject it. I'll also attach a sample .fdi, which works fine for me when placed in /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy/30user (where it overrides HAL's default settings in /usr/local/share/hal/fdi, according to the HAL documentation). If you have a distribution-provided version of HAL rather than a self-compiled one, you'll probably have to use /etc/hal instead of /usr/local/etc/hal. So far I haven't noticed any undesired side effects with this, YMMV.
Created attachment 81367 [details] [review] Patch to provide both eject and unmount on right-click
Created attachment 81368 [details] HAL .fdi to set "storage.requires_eject" to "false" for CD/DVD drives
Thanks for your efforts! I don't think this is going to happen, though - see bug 358312. Shouldn't the applications you mention (burner, qemu) support auto-unmounting for previously mounted CDs?
*** Bug 358312 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Well, I'm not sure. Of course, each and every single CD burning application could (or maybe even should, in that case, as working with CDs/DVDs is such an application's main purpose) provide an unmount feature as well. But so could each and every media player (MP3 collections on CD/DVD), graphics viewer (photo collections on CD/DVD), and just about any other type of application that might ever want to read data from a CD/DVD. But that's beside the point here, IMHO. The unmount-before-burn was just an example. Nautilus is a file manager. Among all the other very nice things it does, it provides an interface for managing removable volumes/drives/media/whatever. And what I don't quite understand is the actual point of making Nautilus, which is not just any file manager, but the one GNOME file manager, unable to perform such a very simple and very common every day operation as unmounting a CD/DVD, _on purpose_. In addition to normal HDD partitions, Nautilus can (mount and) unmount MP3 players, cameras, external HDDs, card readers, and just about every other USB and FireWire gadget out there as well. Yet it can not do the same with simple CDs and DVDs, one of the most common media types out there, although it mounts (and ejects) them just fine. What's the actual rationale behind this? What makes unmounting a CD/DVD so exceptional, so special, that it seems to be the only operation on (removable) media that Nautilus is unable to perform? I'm really, really curious. :-)
Setting patch status to "needs-work" because it doesn't apply anymore to SVN trunk.
*** Bug 543849 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
It seems that as of Gnome 2.24 the unmount functionality fo CD/DVD is available in nautilus (as a side effect of some other changes ?), so the above patch (and the special fdi file) is not needed. Shouldn't the status of the patch be changed from needs-work to some other ? Still the unmount option is not present in drivemount_applet. It would be good to have the same set of options in both places.
Yeah, and it's gone again in 2.26. :-( From the Nautilus 2.26.0 NEWS file: "Major changes in 2.25.93 are: * ... * Never show unmount if we show an eject menu item * ..." And the corresponding bug report is http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574067 ... looks like it has been removed again because it's confusing (of all things!) to have both available. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!
The applications should absolutely be able to handle this themselves. I would not expect to have to go to a file manager to run some magic before I can do what the applications were designed to do.