removable storage usability, devd, hald and X11-desktop in general

[Harry Schmalzbauer]

Am 20.05.2018 um 23:52 schrieb EBFE:
> On Sat, 19 May 2018 20:35:59 +0200
> Harry Schmalzbauer <freebsd at omnilan.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
>> Biggest question: How are useres expected to handle removable media?
>>
>> I'm a happy user of autofs(5) in several environments (mostly for NFS
>> mounts), but I'm not aware of any helper tool which enables _users_
>> to unmount before pulling the UFD.
>> I've heard of PC-BSD and Lumina (see later why I haven't really tried
>> out the modern "light" desktops) and I think I remember having read
>> they utilize devd(8).  But again, how to unmount?
> 
> There is a nice little daemon: sysutils/dsbmd
> (see https://freeshell.de/~mk/projects/dsbmd.html
> and /usr/local/etc/dsbmd.conf.sample)
> 
> with a simple GUI sysutils/dsbmc and cli (sysutils/dsbmc-cli) clients.
> It supports automounting using devd and/or polling and automatic
> or manual unmounting.


Thanks!  Also to Kurt and Edward for their answers.  Suitable advises 
for people with an idea what a filesystem is about, but not for my step 
daughter.  Even if her biggest idol would tell her that it's cool to 
wait 5 seconds before pulling the UFD, she wouldn't accept; if she's 
ready with copying, the device also has to be ready. period. But she 
accepts the "eject" step from other OS...  it's a instruction she tells, 
so it's acceptable.  As long as she needn't to type anything...  And 
she's by far not the only one I know with similar expectations – the 
computer has to do what the user tells, as soon as the user has to 
follow "strange" computer "rules", fun abruptly ends ;-)

sysutils/dsbmc is completely new to me.

Meanwhile I read about sysutils/bsdisks – UDisks2 compliant.  Never 
heard of UDisks2 before, but will have a look asap, sounds interesting too.

It's supposed to be supported by x11-fm/pcmanfm-qt – by far the most 
sensible x11 filemanager I've tried so far (offers checkmark to store 
folder specific preferences, switches from beautified path to text path 
on click, easy to configure single-click, and the usual thumbnail etc. 
is working too at acceptable performance – not even close to Rox filer 
or Thunar, but this might vary if one doesn't use it from gtk session 
but Qt based session/desktop).

Also found out that it should be easily possible to use xfce4wm with LXQt.
As time permits I'll keep trying out those highly appreciated 
alternatives – I've always been happy that my X11/xfce4 desktop helped 
my saving time compared to Windows XP, but since then, many usability 
cherries grew in windows, which I'm missing on X11 and hoped that the 
famous X11 desktop projects would have picked.  pcmanfm-qt at least 
catches up with XP usability...

-harry