impact of blank DVD insert

[Duncan]

Felix Miata <mrmazda at earthlink.net> posted 4A69EB3D.9050208 at earthlink.net,
excerpted below, on  Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:11:25 -0400:

> I get the impression neither of you understood all of what I wrote.

Indeed.  FWIW had groked it, but with them helping and me in the midst of 
trying to switch from kde3 (3.5.10) to kde4 (4.2.4), I decided to wait a 
bit and see what came of the thread... maybe /I/ was the wrong one (tho 
it seems I wasn't).

> If I put in a blank DL DVD without Konq or K3B already open, Konq opens
> up and gives an error message in a popup window: 'Method "Mount" with
> signature "ssas" on interface "org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume"
> doesn't exist'.

Yeah, mounting a blank isn't going to work, you need the popup, or to 
change it to "do nothing" and handle it from a running k3b.

> Ordinarily I make don't close K3B unless I don't plan to use it for
> another right after, which means I copy one DVD to iso file, then burn
> the iso, then repeat. So, there's no logical reason to close K3B just to
> have to wait on the "what do you want to do" popup to open it yet again.
> It really doesn't matter if K3B is already open or not, because the
> popup happens in any event. What's really more stupid is after K3B made
> an ISO out of the original and asked me for the blank disk, the Konq
> popup and error of my previous paragraph occur anyway. The fact that K3B
> was already using the sr0 device ought to have blocked the action
> chooser window (or Kaffeine) when the already recorded DVD is inserted
> to copy from, and blocked the Konq window from opening when the blank
> was inserted to copy to.

The thing is, device notifications don't work quite the way that would be 
necessary for the most intuitive thing to work; that is, device 
notifications are initially a kernel and udev thing, handled by hal, 
which gets notified of a device status change quite independent of 
whatever else might have just been using the device.  Applications can 
then sign up to be notified by hal, but (AFAIK) each one that has done so 
don't really know what others might also be doing so.  Thus, the kde hal 
handling layer (that gives you the popup) would have to be hard-coded 
with a list of apps that if running, meant that it should ignore the hal 
notification -- as well as which hal notifications to ignore.

Given the wide variety of apps and their usage, and the fact that many of 
them aren't going to be kde specific, the whole thing very quickly 
becomes complex enough that it's simply not possible to get correct in 
every instance.  Thus, the practical choice becomes one of always doing 
the same thing for a specific type of notification, regardless of what 
else might be running.

Now that "same thing" is configurable, and the problem you have ATM is 
that it's configured wrong and you want to know how to reset it to get 
the popup again.  Which leads to the following direct question:

> Once an "always do this" box is applied to a chooser window choice,
> where do you go later to change that choice?

Good question! =:^)

/As/ I mentioned above, I'm in the midst of switching between kde3 and 
kde4 ATM, as are the various apps such as k3b, for which AFAIK there's no 
official kde4 release, yet.  Thus my situation ATM is that I'm running a 
base kde4 (4.2.4), but k3b from kde3.  As such, there's all sorts of ways 
the following might not apply exactly to your situation, and I'm not 
absolutely positive it's entirely correct in mine either, but here's a 
shot at an answer:

KDE (and a lot of Linux/Unix software in general) treats this 
notification as a filetype, aka mimetype, the same as if you were 
browsing a directory and it needed to figure out what icon to display or 
how to open a particular file.  Well, here, it needs to know what to do 
when it comes across this particular mimetype as well, and the way you 
configure it is the same, using the file associations configuration (in 
kcontrol, control panel, system settings (under advanced), and/or 
konqueror's configuration, depending on kde version, etc).

In particular, at least on kde4, it appears various optical media types 
are to be found under the x-content category.  You'd be interested in
x-content/blank-cd, x-content/blank-dvd (and blank-bluray if it applies, 
and...), etc.

See if changing those has any effect.  Note that you may need to restart 
kde (logout and back in if you're using xdm/kdm/gdm/etc) for the changes 
to take effect desktop wide, I'm not sure.

Note that there may be additional configuration needed as well.  I'm not 
sure and not in a position to test ATM.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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