Pressing a button in linux is too complicated

[Brian Kelsay]

Some helpful hints.  Use them or not.

1) The drive, cable or drive controller may be bad or going bad.  Make sure the drive is not set to cable select.  Check cable for nicks or cuts.  Try another CD drive in it.

2) Hold down the shift key when you insert a disk to stop this.  To permanently disable autoplay, right-click the drive and under properties, disable autoplay.  You should be able to figure it out from there, but each Winders is a bit different so I can't give more detail.

5) Ctl-Alt-Esc on NT/Win2k/XP, end any process that is not responding.  NT may want to reboot depending on what was frozen, the other 2 recover semi gracefully.  If you are using a 95/98/ME version, or you can't follow any of this free advice, my rates are.....

3,4,6) true

Brian Kelsay

>>> "Brian Densmore" <> 01/14/05 10:16AM 
My thoughts on the ease of use of Linux and devices, versus Windows.
1) Windows doesn't always allow you to eject a cd, even if it is only CDROM
drive. I have constant problems with the older CDROM on my office PC. Sometimes, it will take in a cd and then the entire CDROM will disappear from the filemanager.  And if I ask it why, it says something like 'there is no CDROM on the computer, please reboot'.

2) Windows will sometimes annoyingly run anything I insert into my cdrom, even if I've just taken the CD out and reinserted it to get the software key off of it, without asking me first.

3) I generally do not have any problems using a CD or DVD on my Linux desktop. If I insert a CD all I do is click on an icon and "presto chango" the cd mounts and opens up a file manager or starts xine or plays the music on it. Actually that last statement isn't strictly true, because it autodetects and plays music CDs.

4) occasionally, I will come across a rogue application that locks the CD and I have to ps search it out and kill it. 

5) Occasionally a rogue windows program will lock the CD and refuse to release it and refuse to allow me to find the culprit and kill it. Forcing me to reboot or at the least log off and back on to free it up.

6) The problem with Linux ease of use is the all too frequent spreading of Linux Usability Myths.