>>>>> "Fish" == Fish Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Fish> Unlike many others, I don't share the view that "linux needs Fish> to be made more newbie friendly." Doing that will kill Fish> everything that made it great, and turn it into another Fish> Windoze. I don't care if the entire world doesn't all use Fish> GNU systems, as long as I have them to get my work done. If Fish> somebody doesn't understand, I will be helpful and try to Fish> explain, but if they don't want to tolerate a system with a Fish> learning curve then they don't have to use it, and probably Fish> don't deserve to. Leave this domain to those of us who do Fish> care to learn. It is not only newbies that can make stupid mistakes, and remove a floppy disk that is currently mounted... Perhaps the real problem with soft ejects is that current implementations make it to easy to override, eg when the power is off. Personally, I think I would much prefer the risk of not being able to eject a disk, rather then the risk that someday I will accidently currupt an important disk by ejecting it when it is still mounted. These protection devices not need to turn you into a windows[1] user, I think it is just plain common sense. Other protection mechanims already exist in Linux, eg you can't eject a CDROM that is mounted (I guess this protects programs from crashing that are currently using it), you can't e2fsck a mounted filesystem, etc. Note: [1] Dos/windows copes with this problem in a different (IMHO broken) way - it keeps track of which disk is inserted, and if it needs to read/write to another disk, it complains to the user to reinsert the original disk. Why is this mechanism broken? For starters: some games will automatically eject a CD-ROM and ask you to insert the next CD-ROM. For some reason, windows will often decide that it still needed the original CD-ROM, and ask you to reinsert it!!! It even goes as far as to suggest that the CD-ROM might be dirty. Now thats what I call "machine is smarter"!!! -- Brian May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>