The state of hotpluggable drives and devices....

Over Chirstmas I recieved a portable MP3 Player (MPIO FL300 www.mpio.com) and 
had sucess getting it working with Ark, however there are a few caveats:

PROBLEM:

Caveat #1: Improper handling of the device.

This device is not partitioned. In other words, it's read like a single block 
device without partition signifiers. Currently, when I plug this device in to 
my front USB ports on my system, hotplug attempts to create a desktop icon 
and entries in /etc/fstab, but since it doesn't think that block devices 
should be using the whole disk, creates four icons on the desktop ( sdX1-4 ), 
and since it cannot be bound to any of these devices, hotplug cannot mount 
it.

Caveat #2: Automated handling of /etc/fstab eats hand edited entries.

Due to the problem detailed above, I hand entered my device into my /etc/fstab 
to mount the drive. Fun part comes in when I _remove_ the device from my 
computer; it deletes the entry I had HAND ENTERED! While Ark is aiming to be 
a desktop OS, we need to remember it's a UNIX-like OS. If I wanted changes I 
had made to be wiped out, I'd still be on Windows dealing with it's who-do 
magic it does on the Registry. For the moment, I digress, since the solution 
that I have at the end of the email will cover this.

Caveat #3: Creation of unwanted desktop icons.

I'm pretty particular about what is and is not on my desktop. Additionally, I 
am very exacting of my icon layout. While the icon layout is a KDE bug (one 
that was voted to death and is resolved for KDE 3.4), teh inclusion of icons 
and removal of the aforementioned icons is not something I'm thrilled with. 
For this reason I disabled the auto insertion system, since it too adds 
unneeded icons to my desktop. The solution at the end of this mail will 
address this as well.

Caveat #4: Current solution does not integrate with KDE devices:/ kio-slave.

By default, the devices:/ kio-slave is disabled in Ark. The reason for this is 
that our current tools do not properly integrate with it. The reason I like 
having it turned on is to allow for three reasons:

	1) easy mounting of devices via rmb.
	2) persistant device icons for block devices that will be used frequently,
		eliminating confusion.
	3) ease of access to mount points.

Caveat #5: Poorly named mount points.

While /etc/[hdXX|sdXX] is fine for IDE, SCSI, and USB hard disk devices, they 
aren't that useful for flash, mp3 players, and cameras. good practice would 
be to name the mount point after the device's name or function.

SOLUTION:

While the issues that I have with our hotplug system are annoying as hell, 
they are fixable. The solution for this is 2 kcms, one that handles the 
behaviour of the graphical portions of the handling of devices, another for 
fstab handling, additional UIs for requesting the behaviour at mount of the 
device, hacking the devices:/ kio-slave to do this integration, and adding my 
player to the hardware list with proper handling code.

The first kcm needs to allow the user to exempt items from addition and 
removal from the filesystem table. A compromise is addition of special tags 
in the /etc/fstab to set segments in it as immutable. The second kcm needs to 
be able to set the behaviour of our hotplug system to either enable or 
disable the creation of desktop icons. Additionally, the second kcm needs to 
allow the user to be prompted at hotplug event to make the change perminent 
or whether it should revert after each unplug.

The creation of the icons should be done through the devices:/ kio-slave this 
way it is registered and properly handled for the services:/ tree in the 
filemanager mode of Konqueror. The change of naming the mount after the 
device model name makes it easier to find the mount point in the /mnt 
directory since users don't know what hdXX or sdXX mean, but they do know 
things like MPIO_FL300.

Finally, the information about my device:
mpio FL300 mass storage needs detected automatically and mounted at 
mpio-fl300.
  This device uses either the ub or the usb-storage driver and mounts on the 
ubXX or sdXX device nodes.
  Vendor ID: 0x2735
  PID:       0x100a
  USB 1.10 device.

-- 
Gary L. Greene, Jr.
Sent from uriel
 11:12:06 up 14:22,  6 users,  load average: 0.58, 0.56, 0.47
 
============================================================
Developer and for the Ark Linux Project
 check out http://www.arklinux.org/ for more info.
 Also http://www.csis.gvsu.edu/~greeneg/
EMAIL : greeneg-9zdaV+82baBWk0Htik3J/[email protected]
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