7/3/2005

Volume Handling & iPods

Cardoe wrote this at around evening time:

So some cool new things are happening in the world of Gnome & Volume management. All developments are happening on the HAL and better integration support. As some might know I work on the Gentopia overlay with some other Gentoo developers and work like this is our prime integrating example.

First for all our iPod fans, fejj has managed to integrate iPod support directly into Gnome using Sonance, a C# GStreamer based media player.

Next are some patches to gnome-vfs2 to use libhal add/del messages rather then /etc/fstab entries to generate drive and volume entries. This now means more code is free of the shackles of fstab-sync, the devil program that is going away. There’s also the ability to show a drive even when there is no media in the drive. And the last two are by far the most important. Allows specific mount/umount/eject programs for handling of different media/HAL types. Which will clearly allow for the ability to lockdown pluggable media types properly and securely and remove the necessity of fstab entries since we could be prompted where to mount or use gconf keys. Also properly detailed and descriptive mount/umount error messages and proper handling of when applications hold files on a mounted device. And since I’ve mentioned gconf keys, the last thing was gconf keys to specify all sorts of settings like “Require Admin Password to Mount” with dialog boxes coming up. And even specifying which drives are visible and which aren’t. More details over at the Utopia Mailing List or David Zeuthen’s blog.

Hot on the heals, Robert Love released gnome-volume-manager 1.3.2 to support some of these enhancements.

All this and more coming to a local Gentopia overlay near you.

* Filed under: General, Gentopia, Linux

One Response to “Volume Handling & iPods”

  1. Rémi Says:
    July 3rd, 2005 at 9:30 pm

    It’s an honest question I’m about to ask:

    What’s wrong with fstab-sync ?

    I like it that even console apps can benefit from the utopia stack. Can this be replaced with pmount ? I haven’t used it so I don’t know what it does…

    If you could comment on where things are headed in gentoo/gnome/…, that would be very kind because I don’t want to miss out on all the great things coming.

    Thanks for your work :-)

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