USB drive unmount

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Mon, 06 Aug 2007, Scott Balneaves wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 06, 2007 at 06:34:47PM -0700, Richard Doyle wrote:
> > Local USB drives mount nicely on Edubuntu 7.04 thin clients. Plug it in,
> > it shows up on the desktop, you can read and write files. All good, but
> > I can't find any way to for a local, ordinary, user to unmount the
> > device.
> 
> You don't need to.
> 
> After 2 seconds of inactivity, the usb pen drive's quiesced on the client,
> and unmounted in the background.  Just pull it out, and it's cool.

While the subject is up, I think this is nice, but perhaps not a great idea
from the perspective of consistency.  Most ordinary users have to be told,
repeatedly, not to unplug USB keys without unmounting (or ejecting) them.
Some ignore this advice and may at some point pay a price for it.

Linux, Windows and Mac desktops all have a facility for unmounting like
this.  It seems to me that if you encourage people to just pull the device,
they may take this knowledge to ordinary linux desktops (thinking linux in
general looks after this) or back to other operating systems.  Basically,
people on thin clients may initially be confused that they can't eject them
and once they've got past that, will be taught bad habits.

I'm not saying thin clients should necessarily require the manual unmount,
but perhaps it would be better if it were at least possible for the user to
unmount them, even if it did nothing but make the desktop icon disappear.

Perhaps this is too difficult, I'm unsure how the thin client magic device
stuff works.

Gavin