Hi, I have Fedora 8 and on the gnome desktop I see some icons from my partitions that I don't wan't on my gnome desktop.
I don't have a problem with having my storage partition on my desktop but I also have also 4 other linux distos on my laptop and I see all of their system partitions on my desktop!
I know that there is a way to disable ALL partition shortcuts but then I wouldn't see my usb drives on desktop when I plug in usb flash drives and I don't want that.
So how do I remove only the shortcuts I don't want from my desktop?
I saw an Ubuntu (which obviously also uses Gnome) trick which doesn't work on fedora On ubuntu only drives that are in /media are shown on the gnome desktop. I edited /etc/fstab so that partitions I don't want on desktop are mounted in /mnt - that worked on my Ubuntu but it didn't work in Fedora
And ideas?
Thank you
On 28/12/2007, Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, I have Fedora 8 and on the gnome desktop I see some icons from my partitions that I don't wan't on my gnome desktop.
Yes, this is a problem on Fedora 8 due to, I think, policykit. It seems that after you've given authorization to always mount a partition there is no way (in the GUI at least) to say "I want to revoke the authorization I gave to mount this partition".
Rui
On 12/28/07, Rui Tiago Matos tiagomatos@gmail.com wrote:
On 28/12/2007, Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, I have Fedora 8 and on the gnome desktop I see some icons from my partitions that I don't wan't on my gnome desktop.
Yes, this is a problem on Fedora 8 due to, I think, policykit. It seems that after you've given authorization to always mount a partition there is no way (in the GUI at least) to say "I want to revoke the authorization I gave to mount this partition".
Rui
I don't mind mounting all partition, I don't have problem with that, I just don't want to see icons of all mounted partition on my desktop, only those I choose.
Valent.
On 12/28/07, Rui Tiago Matos tiagomatos@gmail.com wrote:
On 28/12/2007, Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, I have Fedora 8 and on the gnome desktop I see some icons from my partitions that I don't wan't on my gnome desktop.
Yes, this is a problem on Fedora 8 due to, I think, policykit. It seems that after you've given authorization to always mount a partition there is no way (in the GUI at least) to say "I want to revoke the authorization I gave to mount this partition".
Rui
I found an relevant forum post: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?p=931284
and I posted RFE to Redhat bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=426907
Hope this helps sort this issue...
Valent.
On 12/28/07, Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/28/07, Rui Tiago Matos tiagomatos@gmail.com wrote:
On 28/12/2007, Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, I have Fedora 8 and on the gnome desktop I see some icons from my partitions that I don't wan't on my gnome desktop.
Yes, this is a problem on Fedora 8 due to, I think, policykit. It seems that after you've given authorization to always mount a partition there is no way (in the GUI at least) to say "I want to revoke the authorization I gave to mount this partition".
Rui
I found an relevant forum post: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?p=931284
and I posted RFE to Redhat bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=426907
Hope this helps sort this issue...
Valent.
And now the correct link :) http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/showpost.php?p=897548&postcount=13
On Fri, 2007-12-28 at 11:03 +0100, Valent Turkovic wrote:
I don't have a problem with having my storage partition on my desktop but I also have also 4 other linux distos on my laptop and I see all of their system partitions on my desktop!
I know that there is a way to disable ALL partition shortcuts but then I wouldn't see my usb drives on desktop when I plug in usb flash drives and I don't want that.
So how do I remove only the shortcuts I don't want from my desktop?
If this is the biggest problem we have in Fedora, I think we're doing pretty good. Anyway, I there are two solutions
1. Add yet another gconf key to /apps/nautilus/desktop
2. Tell such users to use comment=hidden in /etc/fstab entries for such drives and make gvfs honor this so a mount point is hidden if it matches such an /etc/fstab entry.
Since this affects only the kind of people who have > 1 Linux distro installed (for dual- or tripple-booting with Windows and Mac OS X you actually want this. IMO ditto for dual booting with other Linux installations but apparently others don't think so), I think we should go for 2. Alex?
David
On Dec 30, 2007 7:14 PM, David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
- Tell such users to use comment=hidden in /etc/fstab entries for such drives and make gvfs honor this so a mount point is hidden if it matches such an /etc/fstab entry.
Since this affects only the kind of people who have > 1 Linux distro installed (for dual- or tripple-booting with Windows and Mac OS X you actually want this. IMO ditto for dual booting with other Linux installations but apparently others don't think so), I think we should go for 2. Alex?
Is hiding all things defined in fstab not sufficient? Do we need a a new comment=hidden syntax? Are there reasonable usage cases where you want things which are defined in fstab to be displayed in the user UI? I would have thought anything listed in fstab would be preferred to be hidable in the general case.
-jef
On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 19:35 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Dec 30, 2007 7:14 PM, David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
- Tell such users to use comment=hidden in /etc/fstab entries for such drives and make gvfs honor this so a mount point is hidden if it matches such an /etc/fstab entry.
Since this affects only the kind of people who have > 1 Linux distro installed (for dual- or tripple-booting with Windows and Mac OS X you actually want this. IMO ditto for dual booting with other Linux installations but apparently others don't think so), I think we should go for 2. Alex?
Is hiding all things defined in fstab not sufficient?
Don't think so and no need to make that assumption.
Do we need a a new comment=hidden syntax?
The comment option is not exactly new: man 5 fstab
Are there reasonable usage cases where you want things which are defined in fstab to be displayed in the user UI?
Yes. One example is the use of persistent device names (e.g. the device links /dev/disk/by-*) to specify mount options that unprivileged wouldn't be allowed to specify themselves (e.g. 'dev' or 'suid') or to force a mount point outside /media.
I would have thought anything listed in fstab would be preferred to be hidable in the general case.
Then you'd just get complaints from people who disagree with that. Everyone's a critic.
David
On Dec 30, 2007 8:01 PM, David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
The comment option is not exactly new: man 5 fstab
I meant instead of using a specific comment string to mean hide versus some pre-existing option that would be interpreted as unhide if present. noauto has been suggested by others. But I'm sure you are right the comment option makes more sense. Can you have multiple comment options defined?
I would have thought anything listed in fstab would be preferred to be hidable in the general case.
Then you'd just get complaints from people who disagree with that. Everyone's a critic.
Sorry I meant, hide by default, and use an fstab option to unhide for specific entries you don't want hidden. The question was meant as which makes the best default policy with respect to fstab entries. Opt-out of hide or Opt-in of hide. Naively, I would think it would think hiding all fstab entries by default and using an option to unhide would be the more prominent desire. We are talking about manually added entries so it's probably a coin flip in reality. I'm not going to press the point.
If comment=hide does end up being the syntax to hide, would it be possible to add boilerplate to the fstab file generated at fedora install time to indicate that option can be used to hide partitions in addition to updating the fstab manpage? It might save a lot of additional discussion if admins going into fstab for manual editting see a simple boilerplate notice annoucing the new comment=hide parsing.
-jef
On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 20:24 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Dec 30, 2007 8:01 PM, David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
The comment option is not exactly new: man 5 fstab
I meant instead of using a specific comment string to mean hide versus some pre-existing option that would be interpreted as unhide if present. noauto has been suggested by others. But I'm sure you are right the comment option makes more sense. Can you have multiple comment options defined?
Well, you could have tried this yourself instead of tricking me into trying it out to found out. FWIW, the answer is yes
$ cat /etc/fstab |grep /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.1-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1 /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.1-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1 /mnt/foo auto defaults,users,dev,suid,exec,comment=hidden,comment=foobar 0 0 $ mount /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.1-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1 $ cat /etc/mtab |grep /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/foo vfat rw 0 0 $ cat /proc/mounts |grep /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/foo vfat rw,relatime,uid=500,gid=500,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=ascii,utf8 0 0
Sorry I meant, hide by default, and use an fstab option to unhide for specific entries you don't want hidden. The question was meant as which makes the best default policy with respect to fstab entries. Opt-out of hide or Opt-in of hide. Naively, I would think it would think hiding all fstab entries by default and using an option to unhide would be the more prominent desire. We are talking about manually added entries so it's probably a coin flip in reality. I'm not going to press the point.
Keep in mind that we hide partitions which are mere OS implementation details; e.g. mounts on /, /usr, /var and other FHS2.3 locations as well as /var/tmp, /var/audit since some security guidance documents say it's a good idea to have these on separate file systems.
Personally I think people who wants some non-OS implementation file systems hidden are geeky control freaks with 8 different distros installed on the same hard drive; e.g. a system that is too customized for their own good. I don't think normal people will ever run into these issues.
Frankly, it's certainly not such kind of users I want to optimize GNOME for. That being said, I don't want to make things impossible for them hence why I'm suggesting this approach.
So I think it's like this: Most people with a lot of partitions on a useful system (e.g. one where they don't test drive 8 distros at the same time) either a) don't really use the desktop (it's a server); or b) if they do use the desktop, they just find it's convenient to have the icons on the desktop (because they have useful data on the partitions instead of just different flavors of Linux).
Then again, everyone's a critic when it comes to how the UI should behave and look.
If comment=hide does end up being the syntax to hide, would it be possible to add boilerplate to the fstab file generated at fedora install time to indicate that option can be used to hide partitions in addition to updating the fstab manpage? It might save a lot of additional discussion if admins going into fstab for manual editting see a simple boilerplate notice annoucing the new comment=hide parsing.
That would be a layering violation (a lower layer mentioning how a higher layer works) to mention this in /etc/fstab. And it probably wouldn't apply to KDE or whatever desktop someone is using.
David
On Dec 30, 2007 9:08 PM, David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
Well, you could have tried this yourself instead of tricking me into trying it out to found out. FWIW, the answer is yes
I was actually trying to trick Valent into doing it.
That would be a layering violation (a lower layer mentioning how a higher layer works) to mention this in /etc/fstab. And it probably wouldn't apply to KDE or whatever desktop someone is using.
Making this a GNOME specific thing via a comment option was sort of the concern motivating the multiple comment option question above. If this is going to start out as a GNOME specific implementation, then we run risk of having different desktops requiring different comment strings as hide hints...worst case scenario. Would this be fodder for standardization through a freedekstop discussion? On the other handing building the hiding parsing into hal somehow gives us desktop agnostic functionality. But your the expert there, so I'm assuming you've got a good reason to think the doing this at a higher level makes more sense.
We'll need to make some special effort in our distributions release notes to communicate that the comment=hide syntax is actually heeded specifically in GNOME and ignored in other desktops, if we include this and want people to make use of it appropriately.
-jef
Hi,
Maybe I wasn't clear, but what I was trying to say in my earlier mail that the issue at hand isn't really a big deal; if you think about it it's a quite absurd discussion isn't it? We're talking about people who wants to hide mounted partitions from the desktop.
I'd like to think that if you have a dedicated partition that you actually go through the trouble of mounting at a non-standard mount point, then it's because you have data on it that you want to access. If you want to access the data, then you should get an icon on the desktop.
Now, you (or rather, the people with 8 linux distros on their system) can argue that you didn't mount the partition yourself; that damn GNOME did that for you automatically. So maybe the answer is that we need more fine grained control of what gets automounted and what doesn't [1]. Maybe it means adding an option so this dialog
http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/pk-gnome-mount.png
looks like this
[ ] Remember authorization [ ] For this session only [ ] For this volume only
Yay, more options. But fear not. The desktop live cd for F9 and onwards will come configured to never show the users such stupid annoying dialogs (note: only I may call them annoying and stupid because I wrote them :-) hehe) because we'll grant the user this authorization by default (we can make assumptions about how the desktop live cd is used since it's, uhm, targeted for desktops).
And all the people with 8 linux distros on their system can then just use polkit-gnome-authorization or whatever to tweak the authorizations such that the file systems they want hidden aren't mounted.
David
[1] : And that's in the PolicyKit road map already; basically what needs to be done is the ability to tie authorizations with object paths; e.g. being able to answer questions like "can $PROGRAM do $ACTION on $OBJECT" rather than just "can $PROGRAM do $ACTION" as it is today.
On Dec 30, 2007 10:33 PM, David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
I'd like to think that if you have a dedicated partition that you actually go through the trouble of mounting at a non-standard mount point, then it's because you have data on it that you want to access. If you want to access the data, then you should get an icon on the desktop.
For the simple user desktop case, I would agree with you. But there are non-trivial multiuse scenarios that aren't easily planned for that end up being a hybrid of desktop and server. Personally ive been using the 99-redhat file to hide internal partitions on the machines at home from desktop users which are mounted on demand by services that make use of the storage area. Doing it at the hal layer makes it hide everywhere in the Gnome interface: Computer, Desktop, and disk mounter applet, which makes more sense to me.
Having all partitions show up in computer window as mountable but only having some appear on the Desktop as mounted, doesn't make sense to me either. Being able to turn off disk icons as a group in the desktop, I understand, but selectively its difficult to see why you want them to still be mountable but not show up on the Desktop when mounted. I don't really understand why Valent wants a solution so high up in the software stack and just worrying about hiding already mounted partitions selectively. I'm trying real hard to understand the reasoning to just hide the mounted systems on an individual basis. If we were going to hide things, I would think we'd want to hide them from the Gnome desktop everywhere and that means doing it in the Hal layer so they don't show up in the Computer window as a mountable partition. Maybe Valent doesn't really means what he thinks he means.
-jef
On 12/31/07, Jeff Spaleta jspaleta@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 30, 2007 10:33 PM, David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
I'd like to think that if you have a dedicated partition that you actually go through the trouble of mounting at a non-standard mount point, then it's because you have data on it that you want to access. If you want to access the data, then you should get an icon on the desktop.
For the simple user desktop case, I would agree with you. But there are non-trivial multiuse scenarios that aren't easily planned for that end up being a hybrid of desktop and server. Personally ive been using the 99-redhat file to hide internal partitions on the machines at home from desktop users which are mounted on demand by services that make use of the storage area. Doing it at the hal layer makes it hide everywhere in the Gnome interface: Computer, Desktop, and disk mounter applet, which makes more sense to me.
I was off the mailing list for the week and I see the discussion got long way since I started the thread...
I read through posts on this thread and thought about it. I believe that having partitions show up on the Desktop is a good thing, because on a live CD if you want to make some recovery with live cd.
On a desktop and laptop systems we (more advanced users or even beginners) have more partitions, maybe 2-3 different linuxes, windows, multimedia partition, document partition, windows shared partition... lots of partition :) No I don't use /home for all my data.
I need some of them on my Desktop because it quickens my workflow but I believe that there should be an easy was to remove ones I (and others) don't need on their desktop. The best way from users point of view would be "right click - remove this icon from desktop" or some tool like called Fedora Tweak that would allow this (example: http://ubuntu-tweak.com/screenshots)
I'm far from being a developer and I know about "upstream first", but as I understand this can be done without breaking gnome or doing anything against upstream Gnome.
Having all partitions show up in computer window as mountable but only having some appear on the Desktop as mounted, doesn't make sense to me either. Being able to turn off disk icons as a group in the desktop, I understand, but selectively its difficult to see why you want them to still be mountable but not show up on the Desktop when mounted. I don't really understand why Valent wants a solution so high up in the software stack and just worrying about hiding already mounted partitions selectively. I'm trying real hard to understand the reasoning to just hide the mounted systems on an individual basis. If we were going to hide things, I would think we'd want to hide them from the Gnome desktop everywhere and that means doing it in the Hal layer so they don't show up in the Computer window as a mountable partition. Maybe Valent doesn't really means what he thinks he means.
-jef
I meant exactly what I wrote. Having an icon on the desktop and not being able to remove it easily (just remove it not unmount it) goes agings everything I know about desktop usability.
Valent.
On Jan 5, 2008 10:55 AM, Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic@gmail.com wrote:
I meant exactly what I wrote. Having an icon on the desktop and not being able to remove it easily (just remove it not unmount it) goes agings everything I know about desktop usability.
Why just removed from the Desktop? Why not also the Computer window? Why not also the disk mounter panel applet? Why not also the Places Menu?
The Desktop is not the only interactive UI element where these things show up. I don't understand why the Desktop would be singled out specifically?
-jef
On Sat, 2008-01-05 at 13:16 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Jan 5, 2008 10:55 AM, Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic@gmail.com wrote:
I meant exactly what I wrote. Having an icon on the desktop and not being able to remove it easily (just remove it not unmount it) goes agings everything I know about desktop usability.
Why just removed from the Desktop? Why not also the Computer window? Why not also the disk mounter panel applet? Why not also the Places Menu?
The Desktop is not the only interactive UI element where these things show up. I don't understand why the Desktop would be singled out specifically?
Maybe because it's just so much more "in your face" than the rest, but really it should be treated the same on all of them. For me it boils down to:
1. If it's a permanent mount in /etc/fstab, my normal user persona usually may not unmount it. 2. If the mounted partiton/volume root isn't writable for that user, it's no more special than other non-writable directories like e.g. /usr. 3. With 1. and 2., I see no reason to have an automatic icon for it on the desktop, in the computer window, on the disk mounter applet or in the places menu. Especially not one I can't remove ;-).
Then I don't see a reason for icons that can't be removed, except in the case of removable media or hardware (to have a means to unmmount/prepare the HW for unplugging). For the rest, symlinks in ~/Desktop are just fine (where being removable comes with the package).
Sounds sensible?
Nils
Nils Philippsen wrote:
On Sat, 2008-01-05 at 13:16 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Jan 5, 2008 10:55 AM, Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic@gmail.com wrote:
I meant exactly what I wrote. Having an icon on the desktop and not being able to remove it easily (just remove it not unmount it) goes agings everything I know about desktop usability.
Why just removed from the Desktop? Why not also the Computer window? Why not also the disk mounter panel applet? Why not also the Places Menu?
The Desktop is not the only interactive UI element where these things show up. I don't understand why the Desktop would be singled out specifically?
Maybe because it's just so much more "in your face" than the rest, but
+1 obvious answer
-dmc
On Jan 6, 2008 9:35 AM, Douglas McClendon dmc.fedora@filteredperception.org wrote:
Maybe because it's just so much more "in your face" than the rest, but
+1 obvious answer
Is it in my face? Is it any the average user's face? I have my browser opened all the time, usually taking up significant real-estate. The same goes for all my family members regardless of operating system. The desktop is really never 'seen' and if anything is just a dumping ground for unsorted files that get downloaded/uploaded from other sources (net or removable media.)
Panel real-estate on the other hand is a premium, having unhidable partitions in the disk mounter applet makes that particular panel applet cumbersome to use effectively when you have several mountable partitions.
-jef"still finds it really unfortunate that he can't unmount volumes via a context menu from the Places menu itself and is required to either interact with the file manager icons or use the diskmounter panel applet to unmount a device. Not being able to unmount from Places makes it harder to avoid needing to use the 'Desktop' meme."spaleta
Jeff Spaleta wrote:
-jef"still finds it really unfortunate that he can't unmount volumes via a context menu from the Places menu itself and is required to either interact with the file manager icons or use the diskmounter panel applet to unmount a device. Not being able to unmount from Places makes it harder to avoid needing to use the 'Desktop' meme."spaleta
+1, shouldn't be too hard to fix though
I had been happily just yanking usbsticks for a long time, though just the other day I did manage to corrupt a vfat fs on one pretty badly.
-dmc
On Jan 7, 2008 4:28 PM, Douglas McClendon dmc.fedora@filteredperception.org wrote:
I had been happily just yanking usbsticks for a long time, though just the other day I did manage to corrupt a vfat fs on one pretty badly.
But would you ever want to yank a terabyte sized usb "stick" like Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo 1TB External Drive?
-jef
Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Jan 7, 2008 4:28 PM, Douglas McClendon dmc.fedora@filteredperception.org wrote:
I had been happily just yanking usbsticks for a long time, though just the other day I did manage to corrupt a vfat fs on one pretty badly.
But would you ever want to yank a terabyte sized usb "stick" like Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo 1TB External Drive?
Absolutely, if I trusted that the kernel code was smart enough to never result in a corrupted filesystem.
I mean, as far as a user experience goes, manual unmounting is one of the biggest hassles around.
I know I'm just stating the obvious, and nothing you don't know, but clearly the lack of an external-media-user-interface as robust and easy as MS-windows-3.1 floppy disk interface, has been a serious hinderance to linux's widespread adoption.
Maybe someone knowledgable can fill me in- but is there any reason why currently you *can't*(or shouldn't) yank a terabyte external ext3fs usb 2.0 drive? Obviously I wouldn't do it in an enterprise situation until such a practice was widely accepted in the official documentation for a couple years. But it certainly seems like it should be doable with journaled filesystems, and a data volume which you know that you have finished all commands writing to it, for say 3X the the maximum amount of time you know the system would let it have uncommitted writes.
-dmc
On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 21:46 -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Jan 7, 2008 4:28 PM, Douglas McClendon dmc.fedora@filteredperception.org wrote:
I had been happily just yanking usbsticks for a long time, though just the other day I did manage to corrupt a vfat fs on one pretty badly.
But would you ever want to yank a terabyte sized usb "stick" like Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo 1TB External Drive?
Absolutely, if I trusted that the kernel code was smart enough to never result in a corrupted filesystem.
Hm. I had the impression that even Windows nowadays has icons to "unmount" removable media (like USB sticks), possibly for a reason?
Anyway, you'd also have to trust that the hardware can cope with being yanked, possibly in mid-operation.
Nils
Nils Philippsen wrote:
On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 21:46 -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Jan 7, 2008 4:28 PM, Douglas McClendon dmc.fedora@filteredperception.org wrote:
I had been happily just yanking usbsticks for a long time, though just the other day I did manage to corrupt a vfat fs on one pretty badly.
But would you ever want to yank a terabyte sized usb "stick" like Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo 1TB External Drive?
Absolutely, if I trusted that the kernel code was smart enough to never result in a corrupted filesystem.
Hm. I had the impression that even Windows nowadays has icons to "unmount" removable media (like USB sticks), possibly for a reason?
why I referenced win3.1
Anyway, you'd also have to trust that the hardware can cope with being yanked, possibly in mid-operation.
Doesn't sound like an impossible engineering challenge to me. Also why I referenced waiting 3X the time you know that the OS config would allow writes to be in flight (or ye ol sync mount option).
Maybe it'll be a solved problem by 2030 or so...
-dmc
On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 13:55 -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
Nils Philippsen wrote:
On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 21:46 -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Jan 7, 2008 4:28 PM, Douglas McClendon dmc.fedora@filteredperception.org wrote:
I had been happily just yanking usbsticks for a long time, though just the other day I did manage to corrupt a vfat fs on one pretty badly.
But would you ever want to yank a terabyte sized usb "stick" like Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo 1TB External Drive?
Absolutely, if I trusted that the kernel code was smart enough to never result in a corrupted filesystem.
Hm. I had the impression that even Windows nowadays has icons to "unmount" removable media (like USB sticks), possibly for a reason?
why I referenced win3.1
But then win3.1 is not the shining example of robustness we should thrive to emulate, now is it ;-).
Anyway, you'd also have to trust that the hardware can cope with being yanked, possibly in mid-operation.
Doesn't sound like an impossible engineering challenge to me. Also why I referenced waiting 3X the time you know that the OS config would allow writes to be in flight (or ye ol sync mount option).
Well, not theoretically impossible, but if I recall correctly there are IDE/ATA/SATA(?) -- eeh -- consumer drives out there that don't even guarantee bits to be on disk when they should be. I think Alan wrote something about that a while ago.
Nils
On 1/6/08, Nils Philippsen nphilipp@redhat.com wrote:
On Sat, 2008-01-05 at 13:16 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Jan 5, 2008 10:55 AM, Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic@gmail.com wrote:
I meant exactly what I wrote. Having an icon on the desktop and not being able to remove it easily (just remove it not unmount it) goes agings everything I know about desktop usability.
Why just removed from the Desktop? Why not also the Computer window? Why not also the disk mounter panel applet? Why not also the Places Menu?
The Desktop is not the only interactive UI element where these things show up. I don't understand why the Desktop would be singled out specifically?
Maybe because it's just so much more "in your face" than the rest, but really it should be treated the same on all of them. For me it boils down to:
- If it's a permanent mount in /etc/fstab, my normal user persona
usually may not unmount it. 2. If the mounted partiton/volume root isn't writable for that user, it's no more special than other non-writable directories like e.g. /usr. 3. With 1. and 2., I see no reason to have an automatic icon for it on the desktop, in the computer window, on the disk mounter applet or in the places menu. Especially not one I can't remove ;-).
Then I don't see a reason for icons that can't be removed, except in the case of removable media or hardware (to have a means to unmmount/prepare the HW for unplugging). For the rest, symlinks in ~/Desktop are just fine (where being removable comes with the package).
Sounds sensible?
Nils
I think you have nailed it. It sounds really sensible.
Valent.
On 31/12/2007, David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
Hi,
Maybe I wasn't clear, but what I was trying to say in my earlier mail that the issue at hand isn't really a big deal; if you think about it it's a quite absurd discussion isn't it? We're talking about people who wants to hide mounted partitions from the desktop.
Some people, like me, would just expect that said partitions after being explicitly unmounted didn't get automounted next time they login. I have no issue with them being listed on computer:// I just would like policykit to forget the authorization I gave the first time that dialog came up if I explicitly unmount.
I'd like to think that if you have a dedicated partition that you actually go through the trouble of mounting at a non-standard mount point, then it's because you have data on it that you want to access. If you want to access the data, then you should get an icon on the desktop.
Agreed.
Now, you (or rather, the people with 8 linux distros on their system) can argue that you didn't mount the partition yourself; that damn GNOME did that for you automatically. So maybe the answer is that we need more fine grained control of what gets automounted and what doesn't [1]. Maybe it means adding an option so this dialog
http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/pk-gnome-mount.png
looks like this
[ ] Remember authorization [ ] For this session only [ ] For this volume only
I think the first option is enough if the unmount worked as I described above. And the last one, I actually would expect it to be always checked, i.e. I'd assume that dialog is already tied to a single volume. But that seems to be a current policykit shortcoming as you explain later.
Yay, more options. But fear not. The desktop live cd for F9 and onwards will come configured to never show the users such stupid annoying dialogs (note: only I may call them annoying and stupid because I wrote them :-) hehe) because we'll grant the user this authorization by default (we can make assumptions about how the desktop live cd is used since it's, uhm, targeted for desktops).
And all the people with 8 linux distros on their system can then just use polkit-gnome-authorization or whatever to tweak the authorizations such that the file systems they want hidden aren't mounted.
Several laptops come with one or more "system partitions". Mine currently shows up in my desktop because I gave that authorization. I'd like to remove it from the desktop. This isn't a geeky use case I think.
Rui
David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
I'd like to think that if you have a dedicated partition that you actually go through the trouble of mounting at a non-standard mount point, then it's because you have data on it that you want to access. If you want to access the data, then you should get an icon on the desktop.
That's a non sequitur. Our standard kickstart installation sets up a /data partition. It's used to hold Oracle database and seismic data files, neither of which can sensibly be accessed through an icon on the desktop.
The fact that /data is a separate partition is irrelevant to our customers. It shouldn't appear on the desktop.
Ron
On Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:48:23 +0000 Ron Yorston rmy@tigress.co.uk wrote:
That's a non sequitur. Our standard kickstart installation sets up a /data partition. It's used to hold Oracle database and seismic data files, neither of which can sensibly be accessed through an icon on the desktop.
The fact that /data is a separate partition is irrelevant to our customers. It shouldn't appear on the desktop.
I think people are getting hung up on "separate partition" when really it's more of 'nonstandard mount point'. Had you mounted it in /srv/ or /usr/local/ or somewhere in /var it likely wouldn't show up on the desktop.
Jesse Keating jkeating@j2solutions.net wrote:
I think people are getting hung up on "separate partition" when really it's more of 'nonstandard mount point'. Had you mounted it in /srv/ or /usr/local/ or somewhere in /var it likely wouldn't show up on the desktop.
As currently implemented mounts _in_ those places do appear on the desktop. A mount _on_ /srv wouldn't. There's a hardcoded list of special mount points in gnome-vfs2 that are excluded from appearing on the desktop.
But what's special about that list? It's derived from the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, but the FHS isn't the last word on mount points. It isn't even primarily about mount points. There are some things in the list that are commonly used as mount points (/usr) and some that aren't (/lib).
And a hardcoded list is fragile. There's already a Fedora patch to gnome-vfs2 to add some mount points that got left out upstream.
I think having a list of specially blessed mount points is bad design. For my purposes I've ripped out the list and replaced it with code that prevents anything in /etc/fstab from appearing on the desktop (patch is in Bugzilla #384201). But that might not suit everyone.
Ron
On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 11:48 +0000, Ron Yorston wrote:
David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
I'd like to think that if you have a dedicated partition that you actually go through the trouble of mounting at a non-standard mount point, then it's because you have data on it that you want to access. If you want to access the data, then you should get an icon on the desktop.
That's a non sequitur. Our standard kickstart installation sets up a /data partition. It's used to hold Oracle database and seismic data files, neither of which can sensibly be accessed through an icon on the desktop.
The fact that /data is a separate partition is irrelevant to our customers. It shouldn't appear on the desktop.
That's a non sequitur. Our standard kickstart installation sets up a /data partition. It's used to hold customer documents and references, both of which can sensibly be accessed through an icon on the desktop.
The fact that /data is a separate partition is irrelevant to our customers. It should appear on the desktop.
David
On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 16:29 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 11:48 +0000, Ron Yorston wrote:
David Zeuthen davidz@redhat.com wrote:
I'd like to think that if you have a dedicated partition that you actually go through the trouble of mounting at a non-standard mount point, then it's because you have data on it that you want to access. If you want to access the data, then you should get an icon on the desktop.
That's a non sequitur. Our standard kickstart installation sets up a /data partition. It's used to hold Oracle database and seismic data files, neither of which can sensibly be accessed through an icon on the desktop.
The fact that /data is a separate partition is irrelevant to our customers. It shouldn't appear on the desktop.
That's a non sequitur. Our standard kickstart installation sets up a /data partition. It's used to hold customer documents and references, both of which can sensibly be accessed through an icon on the desktop.
The fact that /data is a separate partition is irrelevant to our customers. It should appear on the desktop.
who is the 'we' in this statement?
-sv
On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 23:14 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
On Fri, 2007-12-28 at 11:03 +0100, Valent Turkovic wrote:
I don't have a problem with having my storage partition on my desktop but I also have also 4 other linux distos on my laptop and I see all of their system partitions on my desktop!
I know that there is a way to disable ALL partition shortcuts but then I wouldn't see my usb drives on desktop when I plug in usb flash drives and I don't want that.
So how do I remove only the shortcuts I don't want from my desktop?
If this is the biggest problem we have in Fedora, I think we're doing pretty good. Anyway, I there are two solutions
Add yet another gconf key to /apps/nautilus/desktop
Tell such users to use comment=hidden in /etc/fstab entries for such drives and make gvfs honor this so a mount point is hidden if it matches such an /etc/fstab entry.
Since this affects only the kind of people who have > 1 Linux distro installed (for dual- or tripple-booting with Windows and Mac OS X you actually want this. IMO ditto for dual booting with other Linux installations but apparently others don't think so), I think we should go for 2. Alex?
I'm still not convinced that ordinary users need (or want) these automatic icons for fixed partitions. There are people who are interested in things as mundane as "partitions"(*) and people who aren't. I'd guess that often the former (administrator types) haven't much use for these cluttering the desktop and that most of the latter (Aunt Tilly types) aren't interested in the fact that their "shared photos" folder is on an obscure "/data" partition (set up by their nephew).
(*): It's odd that the desktop treats physical partitions differently than logical volumes when ordinary users shouldn't be interested in the difference.
If I were a user ;-) I would find it sensible to have (automatic) icons for:
- computer, home, trash - (partitions on) removable media, cameras, etc.
I would find it quite strange to have automatic icons on the desktop which point to directories on which I can't even write. The chance for a read-only (mounted) directory on a fixed physical partition (or even logical volume) to be interesting to a normal user seems rather remote to me. If such a partition contained a writable directory for this user (e.g. for shared somethings), then I wouldn't see how icons on the desktop could be created automatically in a sensible way (recursively scanning the tree underneath doesn't count). As such directories would surely be manually created by some administrator type and would be long-lived, any desktop icons for them could easily be created as symlinks in the desktop directories of the users without much additional work.
Nils
On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 23:14 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
On Fri, 2007-12-28 at 11:03 +0100, Valent Turkovic wrote:
I don't have a problem with having my storage partition on my desktop but I also have also 4 other linux distos on my laptop and I see all of their system partitions on my desktop!
I know that there is a way to disable ALL partition shortcuts but then I wouldn't see my usb drives on desktop when I plug in usb flash drives and I don't want that.
So how do I remove only the shortcuts I don't want from my desktop?
If this is the biggest problem we have in Fedora, I think we're doing pretty good. Anyway, I there are two solutions
Add yet another gconf key to /apps/nautilus/desktop
Tell such users to use comment=hidden in /etc/fstab entries for such drives and make gvfs honor this so a mount point is hidden if it matches such an /etc/fstab entry.
Since this affects only the kind of people who have > 1 Linux distro installed (for dual- or tripple-booting with Windows and Mac OS X you actually want this. IMO ditto for dual booting with other Linux installations but apparently others don't think so), I think we should go for 2. Alex?
Kinda 2. But I don't think having it in fstab is good enought. Not all mounts have fstab entries, and you might still want to do things like hidden (and other markups like "notrash" or "nopreview").
So, I think we should modify the mount tools and the kernel to handle a mount option like "udata" which is just passed out verbatime to userspace in /proc/mounts. You can then mount stuff with -o udata=nodisplay,notrash and have the userspace handle those options. They can be set both in fstab and when automatically mounting things with gnome-mount or manually mounting stuff.
I've seen people wanting this for other stuff too.
Valent Turkovic wrote:
Hi, I have Fedora 8 and on the gnome desktop I see some icons from my partitions that I don't wan't on my gnome desktop.
Happy New Years, and thanks for providing me a golden opening for a truly unimportant rant-
Personally in response to your issue, I remind you of what you probably already know- There is absolutely no reason you NEED to have a *&@#!!! file manager as your desktop. Just gconf nautilus away from your desktop, and then open nautilus/places from your main menu, or a panel launcher when you need to.
(IMO) What a stupid microsoftism (or whoever they copied from copied it from ism) to be chasing.
Sure it's all a nice and sexy advertisement of linux handling removable storage in a not completely sucky way (anybody remember supermount?). But once we get to the point of removable storage handling working in a robust stable unchanging way for a while, the novelty and joy of getting instant feedback that the mechanism actually worked, will wear off.
You can still have that annoying stupid 'import photos' dialog pop up which can be a gateway to opening the file manager to that volume.
What else is the desktop-as-filemanager useful for? A cache of icon-'desktop'-entries that the user likes? That would be much better served if modifying the main menu were as easy as it already is to drag an entry from there to the panel.
Anyway, Happy Holidays folks, you may now resume your long thread, which I appreciate solely for the reminder of the fstab comment entry, which I'm surprised jkatz didn't overtly point out to me yet, if he was reading this thread (as it relates to my desire to have some clean mechanism to protect a filesystem which is a subcomponent of the rootfs from being unmounted before the rootfs).
Cheers,
-dmc
I don't have a problem with having my storage partition on my desktop but I also have also 4 other linux distos on my laptop and I see all of their system partitions on my desktop!
I know that there is a way to disable ALL partition shortcuts but then I wouldn't see my usb drives on desktop when I plug in usb flash drives and I don't want that.
So how do I remove only the shortcuts I don't want from my desktop?
I saw an Ubuntu (which obviously also uses Gnome) trick which doesn't work on fedora On ubuntu only drives that are in /media are shown on the gnome desktop. I edited /etc/fstab so that partitions I don't want on desktop are mounted in /mnt - that worked on my Ubuntu but it didn't work in Fedora
And ideas?
Thank you
On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 10:58 -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
Personally in response to your issue, I remind you of what you probably already know- There is absolutely no reason you NEED to have a *&@#!!! file manager as your desktop. Just gconf nautilus away from your desktop, and then open nautilus/places from your main menu, or a panel launcher when you need to.
Amen. Hopefully some day we'll be able to escape the "desktop" metaphor with something more useful; nemo-like or OLPC journal-like.
Colin Walters wrote:
On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 10:58 -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
Personally in response to your issue, I remind you of what you probably already know- There is absolutely no reason you NEED to have a *&@#!!! file manager as your desktop. Just gconf nautilus away from your desktop, and then open nautilus/places from your main menu, or a panel launcher when you need to.
Amen. Hopefully some day we'll be able to escape the "desktop" metaphor with something more useful; nemo-like or OLPC journal-like.
We already can: use the maximize button. On my main laptop every top-level window is always maximized, with the exception of Nautilus and terminal windows. In fact I often go months without seeing my desktop. It doesn't even matter how messy it is! Except that I just cleaned it up halfway through writing this message.
:)
Zack
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