Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Everitt]

I'm sure most of you are familier with this problem, if you change drives, and use the same mountpoint (which is normally the case with flash drives and things) then ROX displays the contents of the first disk.
As far as I can see the solution to this is actually very simply, just pass rox the -x parameter, ie, where pmount says

[GeoffS]

Everitt
Yes CDs do it and I think from memory (long time since I used one) floppys do it also. Seems reasonable that all removable devices would have the same problem.
Cheers
Geoff

[Everitt]

I seems that pmount has been totally rewritten for dingo anyway, and I'd be very surprised if the new version wasn't compatible with older versions of puppy, so I admit I was lazy and just edited every call to open ROX. The uploaded file contains modified versions of pmount from 3.01 and from dingo alpha 4 (and the output of 'diff', so you can see how little I've done. )

I've also had the idea that as, in puppy, 'mount' is a shell script then the problem can also be fixed here, just get ROX to refresh a mount point every time something is mounted there. I've included this in the attached file too. It's based on 'mount' from dinga alpha 4.

[John Doe]

[Bruce B]

I don't see a problem here. Maybe its because my idea of handling removable media is that the procedure is to unmount it, then remove it.

I one wants to insert other removable media the idea is to insert it then mount it.

But these features are built into ROX-Filer to automate the process. I'll show by picture.

/mnt/sda1 is the partition on my USB Flash Stick

Note in first pic it is not mounted.

[Bruce B]

In the next pic a single click:

1. mounts sda1
2. changes directory to /mnt/sda1
3. displays contents

[Bruce B]

In the pic below I back out of sda1 to the parent directory and ROX gives me the options shown in the pic.

The USB device won't eject. But if I were working with CD Discs, I could with ROX features almost effortlessly check the contents of dozens of discs.

[Bruce B]

I noticed the subtitile of this topic was marked 'solved!?'

I think there something needs solution or understanding.

ROX-Filter was been with us as long as I've been with Puppy. What's been missing is a very important and fundamental configuration file. The file I'm referring to is /etc/fstab. Puppy files out entries in fstab only minimally. Not enough allow ROX to do its job of handling mounting, unmounting and ejecting tasks as beautifully as it designed to do.

I noted in earlier times that Puppy users often didn't know how to mount and unmount devices. Sometimes it was too cumbersome. A need for more functionality and ease of use was obvious and the need was met by the authors of MUT and Pmount.

MUT and Pmount don't use fstab. ROX is also unaware of what they are doing. Thus it can appear there is something not quite right with ROX maybe or just not quite right. Also if ROX is being blindfolded by not having the configuration information it needs, that's not good.

Anyone of these applications need whatever they need to function properly.

By my computing habits, I've been mounting with CLI shortcut aliases, full mount commands for devices which aren't part of the normal devices such as downloaded ISO files. And ROX of course.

Why were Pmount and MUT written in the first place? I can't say. Only that I think I'd have written a script to automatically fill out fstab. Or preferably educate the user to do it, which would probably be an unpopular move.

---------------

Even though the title indicates a ROX problem, I think Pmount will be with us for some time and Everitt's code and suggestion are worth consideration by developers of future Puppy releases. Another Pmount suggestion I have, even though I don't use it, is that I couldn't use it if I wanted. It displays a vertical rectangle that's considerably taller than my 768 pixel height screen. Portions of the display go off screen and can't be moved up to access the features on the bottom end.

The balance of this post is from the ROX-Filer User Manual

Chapter 8. Removable devices

Using removable devices, such as floppy disks and CDROMs under ROX-Filer is quite simple. However, it is important to understand about mounting and unmounting devices.

Mounting a device causes its contents to appear in the filesystem. On a typical setup, the directory `/floppy' is an empty directory on the hard disk. The floppy device is then mounted onto this directory, causing its contents to appear inside. For example, a file called `Letter' on the floppy disk will appear as `/floppy/Letter'.

Devices must be unmounted before the disk is removed. Unmounting causes the system to write any buffered data to the disk. If you remove a disk without unmounting it, it will probably be corrupted. CD and Zip drives often lock the tray while the device is mounted so you can't remove it accidentally.

So that you don't have to specify which device should be mounted at which point in the filesystem every time you want to use a disk, a preset list is usually found in the file `/etc/fstab'. ROX-Filer shows mount points (such as `/floppy') which are listed here but not mounted with transparent grey circles overlayed on their icons.

Clicking on one of these mount points will mount the device for you. The circle turns green to indicate that the device is now mounted. Do not remove the device while the circle is lit! You can unmount the device by clicking while holding down Shift on the `/floppy' directory icon.

You can also unmount a device by closing its directory window (eg, closing the view of `/floppy') and choosing Unmount when prompted. The filer will only offer to unmount devices this way if they were mounted by the filer in the first place.