USB drive unmount

Philipp Hanselmann philipp at schoolnet.na
Tue Aug 7 15:19:21 BST 2007


On Tue, 7 Aug 2007 09:47:46 +0100, wrote 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.

I 100% aggree on that ..
Computer users learned over time, that you have to umount a memory stick, before removing it, otherwise you risk data losses. 
I'm 100 % sure without a message "you can remove the key"  thin client users will be confused.

And how can a user be sure that the memory stick still get still not used by an other program?


* umounting floppy disks
What is the issue with floppy disks? When I enter a floppy disk on a thin client (feisty), the floppy icons appears. I noticed that nautilus shows the floppy disk on his right side. But when I select umount, I get this error message: 
#Unable to unmount the selected volume.
#umount: /media/user9/floppy0 is not in the fstab (and you are not root).
 
Is there is also no need to unmount a floppy disk? Sorry that I come with floppy disks, but it is still imported for us, because 95 % of our users can't effort a memory stick.

Philipp

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