Re: Having Konqueror/kDesktop displaying media volume label

On Wednesday 17 April 2002 15:25, Michel Alexandre Salim wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've always wondered whether it is possible to make Konqueror/kDesktop
> to display a media's volume label. The way Nautilus does it - you get a
> menu listing all the mountable devices and when they are mounted it's
> not the mount point that is displayed as the text below the icon, but
> the volume name - at least for CDs/DVDs.
>

I think it also illustrates an underlying problem with the way Unix/Linux
typically handles removeable media - there's no differentiation between
"the disk currently in drive XXX" and "the disk with label/volume name YYY"

The amiga did this "right", with one logical name for "disks in drive XXX, 
whatever they may be named", and another for "the disk labelled YYY, whatever
drive it's in".   You could cd to either, and the system would prompt you for 
appropriate action if the disk was not currently available.

It's an extra layer of abstraction, and it makes working with removeable 
media MUCH easier if the disk's position in the filesystem is determined not 
just by what drive it is in, but by it's label.  It means with 4 drives, one 
can put the disk in any drive and not worry further about which drive it's 
physically in...

e.g.  

"> cd DF0:" - change current directory to the disk currently in drive zero

compared to 

"> cd MyPictures:"  - change current directory to the disk/volume/assign
called "MyPictures", wherever it may be.

It is, with a little creative manipulation of some automounters, relatively 
"easy", theoretically, anyway, to arrange a similar scheme on linux*, but 
it's not as polished (and doesn't tie in with the Amiga's other great 
feature, Assigns, which were generalised $PATH variables forming a part of 
the VFS)


eg.

/mnt/cdrom is the disk currently in the first cdrom drive,
/mnt/named/Pants is a disk currently attached to the system somehow, anyhow, 
called "Pants".