Hi All, Currently Nautilus offers the option to either unmount or eject (if suitable) a volume, such as an external USB harddisk or flash drive.
There has been discussion in user forums if it is possible to power off those external storage devices as well, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?mode=hybrid&t=451344 http://www.techteam.gr/index.php?showtopic=118719 A way to implement the "unmount+poweroff" in Nautilus is to create a Nautilus action that calls "umount", then "sdparm --command=stop", and there is such a script circulating the forums. Here is what I have in mind in implementing this a. An external device can have several partitions. A power-off must be attempted only when all partitions have been unmounted. Currently, the UI does not offer yet an option of the sort "You have 4 partitions mounted, shall I unmount them all?" but this can be done latter. b. The user should not be confronted with information on "power-off"; a power-off should be attempted when the last partition of a device has been unmounted. That appears to be the case in Win/OSX. c. Sending the STOP command appears not to work for some external USB devices. I think it should be ok to try it anyway after the last umount of a partition. An alternative to sdparm is "sg_start --stop /dev/sdX". d. Sending STOP to a flash drive can switch off the indicator light, which is nice feedback to the user that they can unplug. d. This requires distributions to include "sdparm" or "sg3_utils" by default. I am wondering if there are any gotchas to this approach. Simos _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
