I had to spend most of Saturday morning rounding up some final ancillary parts (keyboard, wireless, bluetooth) for my parents PC, and by lunch time I was itching to get this thing done. I rocked up with their new PC with Ubuntu pre-installed and they were both quite impressed.
I think they have plans for it to be their personal entertainment centre in their study, as the TVs in their house are always occupied.
It took some explaining to them about the concept of free/open-source software, and how to use Ubuntu in general. It was most likely over my Dad’s head, but I think Mum was getting some of it. He’s more than happy, he can watch his music DVDs, listen to his songs, and browse the web. I think that’s where it ends for him at the moment. He did however like GNUbik being a Rubik’s Cube nut.
Setting up Evolution was annoying with his Yahoo! mail account. Yahoo! don’t offer POP forwarding unless you have a premium account :(. I was quite keen on him using Evolution as it has the in-built tasks, vFolders and the claimed ability to sync with a mobile phone over bluetooth (I haven’t found any good sources on how to do this). In the end I opted for Thunderbird and the WebMail extension.
I accidentally forgot to install their HP printer, and got an email on Monday; they were inserting the Windows drivers CD but it wouldn’t start. Whoops! I was able to walk them through it over the phone, which was a thankfully painless exercise. Their bluetooth is also causing some problems, however my adapter works fine, so I’ll have to see about swapping them at some point.
I did however get one interesting query from Mum, which I’d never really thought about before. Ubuntu (and derivatives) recognise when a USB/memory card is inserted, and you can simply open the media and browse the contents using whatever file manager. When you are done you can just yank it out. Yet, there is still the option, to mount and then unmount the device. She mainly asked this of me because in Windows XP, you generally click that little green arrow in the system tray to ’safely remove’ the device.
So what’s the standard? Just plug in the USB and open to get to your files? Or mount and the unmount the USB?
If the media mounts automatically, then opening and browsing is not a problem.
The problems occur when removing the media, especially when data has been written to the device. Ubuntu, and probably others, do not complete the write immediately. If you wait long enough, it will get done. But, if you remove the media before this has happened, then you can get corruption. Same as with Win XP. Bottom line is: for any USB storage device, unmount before removing.
Cheers
Warren
So if the media is plugged in and appears on the desktop, is it mounted?
Here’s what I experience;
If I right-click the icon (after plugging in some media), I’m given the option to Open or Mount; Unmount is greyed out at this stage.
I can open the media at this stage and use it.
Or I could mount it first, in which case I would need to unmount when finished, no doubt.
Do you think it is better to always mount the media, regardless whether or not it can be opened without mounting?
Are there any circumstances where opening without mounting would be okay? CDs come to mind …
Thanks for the input!