On Thursday 13 January 2005 07:34 am, Brian Kelsay wrote:
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.
There is also the argument about whether a "user" should be able to mount and umount filesystems, or if this privilage should be reserved to the root operator. To me, that's a non-question, it should be specific to a given filesystem. No, the user can't unmount "/". Yes, they can mount a CD or a network share to their userspace.
This is getting smoother with the 10.x releases. SuSE's still on a "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, can you reach an update server today?" basis. Usually if I plugged in a USB device, unplugged it, then plugged it in again, it would mount.
Mandrake's very smooth about this, it handles the media just like a desktop workstation should, no hassles, it's just there. (I think gentoo was pretty smooth last week if I recall, but there have been updates since then. New rule tomorrow.)