interesting article, for all those who think Ubuntu is already easy

[Alan McKinnon]

On Friday 26 May 2006 14:44, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 13:44 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > udev is under heavy development and things are changing fast -
> > it's now at the stage where hotplug can be dispensed with. But
> > you still need to edit /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules by hand.
> > The day will come soon when the OS will respond to a udev event
> > by popping up a dialogue saying "This is a new drive you have
> > never used on this machine before. What would you like to call it
> > in future?" It's just not really for that yet.
>
> No it won't, because nobody cares what the device node of a drive
> is called.
>
> The day has already come and gone where all CD drives appear in the
> Computer window, named according to their capabilities (I see
> "CD-RW/DVD-ROM" and "CD-RW/DVD±R") ...
>
> CDs inserted into the drives cause the icon to change to the icon
> and description of the CD inserted; and the contents of the CD is
> automatically made available on the filesystem.
>
> The icon can be used to eject the CD, and make it unavailable
> again.
>
> CD Burners work in exactly the same way; putting a blank disk in
> the drive asks you what you want to write to it.  Firing up the
> burner application by hand gives you a list of drives by their
> description and capabilities.

You misunderstand me. Michael's question was on device nodes pointing 
to apparently random devices depending on whether his USB drive is 
plugged or not.

I replied that udev fixes this. When the kernel sends a udev event, 
the OS is in a position to note that this is a drive never used on 
this machine before an ask the user what to call the *drive* in 
future, giving the user persistent repeatable names to different 
drives. The udev framework to do this is there. The userland tools to 
respond are not there - that's the day that will come soon. Meanwhile 
he can edit his rules files by hand.

I said nothing about what happens when *media* is inserted into the 
drive.


-- 
If only me, you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five