The VL-hot thread

[caitlyn]

I've finally gotten back to the idea of writing an article for O'Reilly on VL-Hot.  I've got the latest rc (maybe actually final) of VL 6.0 installed.  I've been testing with HAL up until now. 

First, congratulations on all the progress you've made.  It works very well indeed and VL-Hot Config really makes this an incredibly flexible tool for a user with half a clue.  One niggle, and it's probably more cosmetics or my personal sensibilities that anything else.  The default mount path is /mnt/vl-hot.  That's been the case for a long time and I really don't have a problem with that.  When I insert a USB stick the icons pop up as expected, but the device is at /mnt/vl-hot/vl-hot.  Isn't that redundant?  Why not just make the default path /mnt much as HAL does with /media.  Second device is /mnt/vl-hot/vl-hot1.  Still redundant.

Yes, I know I can change this in VL-Hot Config but the default behavior looks, well... strange.

One other suggestion:  HAL is capable of reading a device name string on a lot of USB sticks so it comes up with a mount point that is often a brand name or model.  Can VL-Hot do the same at some point in the future? 

Anyway, these are just my thoughts.  I haven't found an actual bug yet 

[Joe1962]

Thanks!

Since what is actually mounted are partitions, not devices (although some older pendrives may not have a partition table but the device is treated as a partition anyway), vl-hot in the more recent incarnations looks for a volume label and uses that as the mount name. If no label is found, it defaults to vl-hot, vl-hot1, etc. I looked into using one of the USB device strings for this a long time ago, and it is certainly doable, but they are not always "nice" names, so went for the labels instead.


EDIT: The new naming convention in the latest releases makes it possible to default to /mnt, but I would have to rethink vlh-umount which relies on a specific dir for unmounting all vl-hot mounted partitions.


EDIT2: BTW, there is a bug in the user selection code on the latest release (already fixed on the svn repo) which causes a failure of the notification popups in many cases.

[caitlyn]

Let me see if I understand this:

If I change from /mnt/vl-hot to /mnt in VL-Hot Config then unmounting won't work?

When you say "user selection code" are you referring to the selection of the default base directory in VL-Hot Config?

I also think I've finally found a bug:  In the 1.x versions if a device is inserted when a system is shutdown the icons for a device was still in place at the next boot even if the device itself is no longer present.  This has mostly been corrected in version 2.0.0 but I have noticed that if I have two USB sticks inserted when I shutdown the icon for the second one will still be present at next boot in Xfce.  This happens in VL 6.0 rc4.10. 

I'm in the middle of writing the article right now and I'd like to be really clear about what a user can and can't expect.

Thanks,
Cait

[caitlyn]

Now I've gone and done it:

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/02/vl-hot-a-non-polling-alternati.html

Joe1962:  I hope you like the write-up.

[Joe1962]

Sorry, I was away for a few days and now I find we are having big problems with the internet connection, I barely managed this reply.

If I change from /mnt/vl-hot to /mnt in VL-Hot Config then unmounting won't work?

Normal unmounting from the desktop icon should work, just vlh-umount won't, as it is still sort of crude...

When you say "user selection code" are you referring to the selection of the default base directory in VL-Hot Config?

No, I meant the code that detects the active GUI user to send the notification as/to.

BTW, I like the article and hope to be able to write a comment next week to clear some things up if the internet connection issue is fixed.

[caitlyn]

Glad you like the article.  If there are some errors or things needing clarification and the O'Reilly page is difficult/slow on your network connection feel free to e-mail or PM me and I'll gladly post the corrections in an obvious way.

[Joe1962]

We got the net connection back today, sort of... but I managed to post a comment. I will paste it here too, for reference:

Very nice article, as I have come to expect from Caitlyn. Just a few points of clarification which I did not have time to send her before the article was finished:

The code for opening a filenamager is not yet operational, though the configuration option was already added to vl-hot-config.

The left-over icons cleanup takes place on the next unmount action, so it will eventually catch up, lol. An option is to set up a small script that runs during boot to take care of this.

There are 2 desktop icons for each partition on XFCE due to a limitation of this desktop environment, which does not seem to handle custom icon actions. On KDE there would be only 1 icon. I have not tested on Gnome so this defaults to the 2 icon system, though it may support the custom actions.

The default mountbase is /mnt/vl-hot/, but the actual mount point within that is taken from 3 sources in order of preference:

1- custom name from vl-hot.conf
2- volume label of the partition
3- vl-hot + a sequential number

This means it will use vl-hot# only if the first 2 options are not set.