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>
On Thursday 13 January 2005 07:34 am, Brian Kelsay wrote:
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.
This is pretty easy to understand if you do a little bit of work with a floppy, which _can_ be ejected while it's still mounted.
Mount one, do some RW, copy a bunch of files to it. Observe the indicator light. When the light is off, eject it. Read it on a different machine. What, no change from when it was mounted?
Stick it back in the original machine, unmount it. Watch the blinkenlight. Oooh, that's it, it's writing the data from RAM cache to the disk! _That's_ why you have to unmount drives before you physically disconnect them!
While most workable desktops can and will cache an entire floppy at once, the same is true to lesser degrees with other media.
With non-writable media, there shouldn't be any reason to 'lock' the drive and prevent it from being ejected. With writable, ejectable media, it should be easy to have the button press send an "unmount" command.
Oddly, I haven't had this problem with USB devices - it seems those aren't cached. Maybe because they're faster?
This is pretty easy to understand if you do a little bit of work with a floppy, which _can_ be ejected while it's still mounted.
What are floppies? I thought those weren't used anymore. At least I try not to, but when I need to I would probably just create an .img and put on a boot cd. Floppies should be banned.
Jonathan
On Thursday 13 January 2005 12:09 pm, djgoku wrote:
What are floppies? I thought those weren't used anymore. At least I try not to, but when I need to I would probably just create an .img and put on a boot cd. Floppies should be banned.
Floppies are handy when you need to move less than 1.5MB of data between machines, and for booting in certain configurations.
My latest floppy projects were Dan's Boot-and-nuke, a handy one-floppy linux distro that will wipe a hard drive, used for a bunch of old office machines with CD's in various states of disrepair, and trying to do an FTP install of Mandrake on a laptop who's CD is dead.
Jonathan
On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 14:50 -0600, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Thursday 13 January 2005 12:09 pm, djgoku wrote:
What are floppies? I thought those weren't used anymore. At least I try not to, but when I need to I would probably just create an .img and put on a boot cd. Floppies should be banned.
Floppies are handy when you need to move less than 1.5MB of data between machines, and for booting in certain configurations.
My latest floppy projects were Dan's Boot-and-nuke, a handy one-floppy linux distro that will wipe a hard drive, used for a bunch of old office machines with CD's in various states of disrepair, and trying to do an FTP install of Mandrake on a laptop who's CD is dead.
I'm still confused, so a floppy is like a cdr/dvdr that only holds 1.5megs? I'm all for the 80's retro stuff, but think I have to draw the line at that, and A Flock Of Seaguls. Just use a usb cdrom then, and if the box doesn't support that, then it should be given to Hal :)
-Bill
I'm still confused, so a floppy is like a cdr/dvdr that only holds 1.5megs? I'm all for the 80's retro stuff, but think I have to draw the line at that, and A Flock Of Seaguls. Just use a usb cdrom then, and if the box doesn't support that, then it should be given to Hal :)
Exactly Bill, floppies are not useful anymore. But remembering now I have one computer that I actually can't install from newer OpenBSD cdroms. So I have to use a floppy which I am working on finding out why it doesn't work.
Jonathan
On Friday 14 January 2005 07:44 am, Bill Cavalieri wrote:
Just use a usb cdrom then, and if the box doesn't support that, then it should be given to Hal :)
In order to give it to Hal, I have to wipe the hard disk. In order to wipe the hard disk, I use a floppy. My wife's laptop doesn't even have a USB port, I think booting to a CD on a PCMCIA adapter would be unlikely. (Fortunately her CD drive still works.)
Sigh. Some people have too much money to spend on toys.
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.)
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Bill Cavalieri -
Brian Kelsay -
djgoku -
Jonathan Hutchins