Unmounting removable media under Gnome

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2007-06-07 at 09:34 +0100, Steve Hill wrote:
> It certainly is to do with compatibility - up until recently (the
> last 
> couple of years) it was certainly unusual to have the media mounted when 
> you weren't actually using it so it was expected that the media wouldn't 
> be mounted if you were trying to erase it, for example.

Let's see. From FC3 through today automounting of storage devices was
handled by g-v-m and HAL. Prior to FC3 there was magicdev which only
handled optical discs:

 Magicdev is a daemon that runs within the GNOME environment and
 detects when a CD is removed or inserted. Magicdev handles running
 autorun programs on the CD, updating the File Manager, and playing
 audio CDs.

Looking at the earliest version of magicdev I find a build date of Wed
22 Sep 1999 04:21:52. That would probably land it (I didn't check) in
RHL 6.1 (codename Cartman) that was released October 4, 1999. So we've
been automounting optical discs since late 1999. That's almost 8 years
by now. Other distributions of Linux have a similar history.

      David