Pressing a button in Linux is too complicated

[Brian Kelsay]

The reason the conversation was complicated and required crawling the process tree was that Duane was using some experimental software.  It was unknown what was locking the process.  This is something he will have to battle if he wants to live on the edge.

In order to streamline the OS, all drives are treated the same.  You can't pull a hotswap SCSI or eject a CD until it is unmounted.  You definitely don't want to eject a CD-R when you are in the middle of burning, so the burning process locks the drive.  If you remove a USB HDD or flash drive without unmounting, you risk data loss or corruption.  Sounds reasonable to me.  So that's why, let's look at how.

On Knoppix, Mepis, DamnSmall, Mandrake, Redhat, hell all current desktop distros I have loaded in recent memory, if you are in X, you most likely will have an icon on the desktop that looks like a drive.  Right click on it and you can mount and unmount to your hearts content.  Left click or double click, depending on how your GUI environment is configed, and you mount and open a file browser in the same motion.  Dead easy.  Knoppix has an extra wrinkle to get write access to the drive so you don't accidentally fubar the drive, but that is another discussion.

There has to be an easier way.  For any complicated system that the computer scientists give us, some kind programmer will come along and simplify the process for the average user.  Probably when they get tired of giving complicated answers to seemingly simple problems.  Lucky for me, I also know how to type the mount and unmount commands.  At least we don't have to drag the drive to the trashcan.  Whatever Apple weirdo thought that was good interface design should be shot.  To me that says, "I'm going to throw out your data now." 


relevant snips included.

Brian Kelsay

>>> jeffslists <> 01/13/05 01:21AM >>>
I had to laugh when I started to read the thread "unmounting a volume"  
This complicated button reminds me of a very short story, "King's 
Advisors and the Toaster" 
<snip>

It seems that no one on this list offered a good solution to unmounting 
the volume.  I read solutions that would work in theory, but I didn't 
see anyone give an easy and fast solution that would always work.
<snip>
A while back I read that retrieving your cd can be really complicated 
because Linus wants the computer to be treated as a server and volumes 
must be unmounted safely.
<snip>
I didn't write this to complain I'm just making fun of Linux distros.  
Next time you can't get your cd out you should read the story about the 
King and the toaster and laugh like me. :)
<snip>