New KDE Infrastructure

[Gav Wood]

KDE Autorun is, as the name suggests, infrastructure for providing KDE with 
notification of when the user inserts a removable medium.

Currently only CDs and DVDs are supported, however it is envisaged that 
Autorun could easily be extended to provide support for Zip disks etc, and 
perhaps other media such as USB drives.

As my machine is based on the Linux kernel, I cannot code a *BSD/other Unix 
variant, however there is a minimal amount of platform-dependant code, and it 
is located in one file. One of the design goals was ease of cross platform 
use (any BSD coders out there who want to help with cross-platform-ising 
Autorun, please get in touch).

For those people who dislike the idea of their computer responding 
automatically to a disc insertion, it can all be turned off with absolutely no 
performance hit at all with one simple checkbox.

The main design goal was however desktop integration; it is *not* yet another 
tool to blindly execute a command on insertion of a music disc. It is hioghly 
configurable from the kcmshell and through judicious use of MIME types and 
service offers, will not only detect a content disc but initially provide the 
user with a dynamic menu detailing possible actions. This menu is populated 
according to MIME type handlers installed on the system and as such even non 
KDE programs can incredibly easily add themselves to this menu. Autorun can 
easily be configured to always do only one type of action (including nothing) 
for a particular disc type.

On entry of a data disc, Autorun can be configured to automatically mount it, 
to execute a "autorun.desktop" file accordingly, to open up a konqueror 
window on it, or even to open up a konsole in the relevant directory.

For those of you that like screenshots, here's a couple:

http://www.indigoarchive.net/gav/autorun1.jpg
http://www.indigoarchive.net/gav/autorun2.jpg

If you fancy taking a proper look at it, KDE Autorun can be found in cvs in 
the directory kdenonbeta/kdeautorun.

As far as features go, I consider it basically finished. My future plans for 
it as mentioned in the current TODO include further integration with 
kmountwatcher (it already uses it fundamentally) and devices:/. Stuff like 
automatically going to cddb on insertion of an audio CD and giving the CD 
name to devices:/.

I've had some good feedback from users and I think this would make a really 
useful addition to KDE; comments?

bish bosh,

gav
-- 
Gav Wood <gav at kde.org>

codito ergo non satis bibivi
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