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

[Alexander Jacob Tsykin]

On Saturday 27 May 2006 00:28, Derek Broughton wrote:
> 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.
>
> Not the device node - you're right that we don't care about that - but what
> you're going to see it called on your desktop.
>
already possible, but is it that important? Anyway, this has not  so much to 
do with udev, and everything to do with your desktop manager. They assign the 
name you see on the desktop, they just link it to the label udev assigns.
> > 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.
>
> And in that case it _is_ using the disk labels, but consider the case of
> using one PC to synchronize to Palms or iPods...  We'd like to have each
> one always be recognizable.
>
in my experience both always are
> > The "naming of the device node in /dev" is entirely irrelevant to
> > anybody with a UI.  For those people without UI, they can use udev TODAY
> > to assign a persistent name to that device; dapper ships with this
> > already -- e.g. I can use /dev/disk/by-id/ata-LITE-ON-COMBO* to access
> > the CD-RW/DVD-ROM etc.
>
> Apparently not.  /dev/disk/by-id/ only contains my HD partitions, not my
> CD/DVD.
>
you can configure udev for it to contain whatever you want (I think, never 
tried it myself, never had the need)
> > It's not that Linux isn't ready for it, we're ready already, it's just
> > that it's the WRONG THING and we're already heading down a much better
> > path.
>
> Yes and No :-)  When you have multiple devices that appear similar (eg,
> block devices with identical file system types on USB) then you need to
> have a way for the _user_ to identify them.  It's almost all there in
> kubuntu - if I connect a usb storage device, it'll show up in /media (and
> possibly on my desktop).  If it has a label, it will use the label as the
> icon name.  I'm not sure how it chooses names otherwise, but I can give it
> any name I want just by renaming it - next time I connect it, it will use
> the name I set.

Just give your device a label when you format it. All of my portable devices 
were formatted in windows, because I get most of them from my dad, and I 
didn't want to format my ipod in Linux because it apparently results in major 
bugs, and its easy enough to do there, I assume that Linux has such a 
function as well.