kdesktop's new device links

[Ralf Nolden]

On Friday 10 May 2002 15:15, Cristian Tibirna wrote:
> On Friday, 10 May 2002 08:39, Melchior FRANZ wrote:
> > > 3) being forced, against my will, to have those icons on my desktop
> > > without being able to remove them [...]
> >
> > kcontrol/look & feel/desktop/display devices
>
> No such thing in my kcontrol.
I have that here. The problem with this is that it makes it *very* cryptic 
because the first thing I got confused about was that I can choose for each 
icon, mounted and unmounted, and that makes no sense. A user needs *one* 
option per device/partition to display them on the desktop. Another thing is 
the question if this makes any sense at all to fixate the displaying of those 
icons to the desktop as it limits the functionality by restricting the 
location where to put those links. Together with the

mycomputer:/  

ioslave, a windows-like behavoir for devices can be emulated (which would 
indeed help the users a *LOT*), but things like system /dev/shmfs shouldn't 
appear an an default naming of partitions in the windows-style makes a lot 
more sense to the average user than /dev/xyz mounted /foo. So, floppys and 
discs should have the same name that kdesktop uses for the templates (Floppy 
and HardDisc) with a letter extension (which is just a description for the 
link and can be changed by the user). This can be done automatically while 
sorting out the devices through /etc/fstab and the device number. Examples:

/dev/fd0, /dev/fd1  Floppy A:  Floppy B:
CD-rom's and DVD's can be detected by their fs type
Hard disc partitions by their device name, fs and partition number
Zip discs always have a fixed /dev/sda4 device number.

So together with collecting the info for the device names used in other 
systems like BSD an automatism that works better than the current 
implementation would be possible. Joseph ? :)

Regards,

Ralf
>
> And there are many other problems with those icons, anyways. E.g. at least
> half of the contextual menu items are useless: "add to bookmarks"?;
> "copy"?; "copy to" (while not yet mounted)?; and especially "edit file
> type".
Format and Eject would be better, indeed :)

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Ralf Nolden
nolden at kde.org

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