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drive mount

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 12:58

2005-12-16
12:58

James, I stopped using drive-mount applet because of this. Granted, there are some more exotic things in there - a few bind mounts, a bunch of nfs mounts that get mounted automatically (for which I have no need for an unmount option, since it will fail anyway), some "conditional" nfs mounts, ...

For me, that was ok - I could do without it. For my dad's computer at home, I was using the old drive mount applet to help him make it easy to unmount floppies after writing to them. It was the only drive mount applet on there. I also had mounts for two nfs shares (used for backup). After upgrading to FC4, the drive mount applet now had a bunch more icons, and it was confusing for him to have two that he couldn't unmount anyway, and the floppy one did not stand out from the others.

Looking at my own screenshot right now, I'm a little confused myself. Some mounts show up as a drive icon, and others as a folder. The difference is probably that drive == not mounted - so that would mean the icons give no indication whatsoever about the type of device/mount they represent.

I agree that it has become very simple to configure, and probably works in the most basic of cases. But even in the basic case, it doesn't seem very usable in its current state. Of course, I am no expert :) I was just too frustrated back when I found this out that I never got round to reporting bugs, because I didn't know where to start. I have very little advice to offer, because I can't come up with an easy solution that doesn't clutter a new preferences dialog.

Maybe some things are detectable from fstab. Some heuristics would be ok - /dev/fd* is probably a floppy, so show a floppy icon. /media/cd* is probably some CD-like device. bind mounts should probably be ignored completely ? NFS mounts for hosts you can't get a ping from should probably not be shown. Distinction between mounted or unmounted should probably be with an emblem, or a color difference (gray vs color ?)

But that's it. The easy way out would be a preference dialog allowing you to pick which to hide. But that would probably make it bigger than the old one was. Thinking about usability is hard...

Anyway, good luck, I hope something comes out of it for the next iteration.

2 Comments


  1. Thomas: that behaviour looks like a bug. Are all of those volumes mountable by the user? The drive mount applet is only meant to show icons for the mount points the user can mount.
    Note also that the applet is using the exact same information for th…

    Trackback by James Henstridge — 2005-12-17 @ 11:56


  2. Thomas: that behaviour looks like a bug. Are all of those volumes mountable by the user? The drive mount applet is only meant to show icons for the mount points the user can mount.
    Note also that the applet is using the exact same information for th…

    Trackback by James Henstridge — 2005-12-17 @ 11:56

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