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" (http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/6271/compu034.html) In this story an engineer and a computer scientist are asked to design a toaster. Here is an excerpt:
----------------------------------------- Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantifies its position to one of 6 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as an index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
(snipped)
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 32MB of memory, a 500MB hard disk and 17inch SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multi-tasking, object-oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a 4-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded and they all lived happily ever after. -----------------------------------------
In windows or any other sane desktop operating system if I want to open my cd-rom drive I press a button and it always opens, unless I'm burning a cd, and even then getting the drive to open is no problem. But with all linux distros, AFAIK, pressing a button can be very complicated. In order to get my cd I have to search through processes using 'ps' and try to determine what process is locking my drive. What a total waste of time. Even though I have a B.S. in computer science I don't care to waste my time searching through processes in order to retrieve my cd. I have been using linux mostly as a server for over six years.
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.
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. I read about someone arguing with him about this problem. I'm fuzzy one the details and I don't know where to find that information again so I guess you'll just have to look for your self to verify this. Linus is not perfect, but he is still one of my favorite software developers. It's too bad he has to make pressing a button so complicated.
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. :)