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Re: Cannot mount floppies in Squeeze



Stephen Powell wrote:
> Tomas Kral wrote:
> > Is it possible to make mount aware of UDisks/devices/fd0 and the like?
> 
> Remember, "mount" was here first, and "udisks" is a recent thing.
> Under the covers, udisks is no doubt calling mount.  The problem
> arose because makers of graphical desktop environments, such as
> GNOME, wanted devices to mount automatically, "just like Windows".
> So they came up with this udisks daemon to try to emulate Windows
> behavior.

A good observation.  And doing something "just like Windows" should
set off alarm bells for anyone who actually realizes this.

> And the udisks daemon causes problems for those who are used to
> doing manual mounts with the Linux mount command.  I'm reasonably
> sure that the attitude of the people who support the mount and
> umount commands will be, "Hey, our stuff works as designed, just as
> it always did.  The udisks people broke it, and the udisks people
> should fix it."

Let me assure you that is what I am thinking.  If udisks is broken
then udisks should fix it.  And certainly we shouldn't go breaking the
mount command just for udisks (aka windows behavior).  (I know you are
not suggesting this.)

> The udisks daemon and the udisks command do provide useful function,
> but not in a totally forward-compatible way.  Sometimes they
> interfere with stuff that used to work.  An example is apt-cdrom
> and aptitude or apt-get when processing mountable media.  You
> may be able to get the desired behavior by using the "--inhibit-polling"
> option of the udisks command in a separate window to temporarily
> disable polling by the udisks daemon while you run older software
> that is incompatible with the udisks behavior.

I find the automounting behavior such as in GNOME to be very, very,
very annoying.  For example if I insert a disk but then realize that
it isn't the right disk then the eject button won't eject it, because
GNOME mounted it behind the scenes and now I need to manually unmount
it so that I can eject it.  That behavior is unacceptable to me.  The
machine is going to do what I want it to do and not the other way
around.  Friend George passed this tidbit to me about GNOME but I
assume other desktop session managers will be similar.

You can disable GNOME from automatically mounting inserted media.
Open up the gconf-editor, navigate through to the
/apps/nautilus/preferences/media_automount variable and disable it.  I
also disable media_automount_open and media_autorun_never too.  With
that media on my system is no longer getting automatically mounted.

Bob

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