Michael Wood

Disable automount in GNOME
Someone (sorry I forget who) was having problems with getting gparted and any other parition manipulating tool like fdisk because Gnome was mounting his pen drive automatically making it “in use”, I couldn’t find anything on the internet on how to turn this off/disable it as i was expecting to have to edit a config file or something.. but no all you need to do is:
System > preferences > Removable Drives and Media
Uncheck Mount Removable drives when hot-plugged and uncheck Mount removable meida when inserted.

Then you can format and manage your paritions on your removable device to your hearts content.

Control panel vs Menus

This brings me nicely onto my brother’s recent blog entry It’s an interesting issue facing GNOME. Personally my views are that there is room for both ideas. I would do this by adding preferences to the menu Bar applet (that’s the one with “Applications Places System”) .With something like “Show preferences menu” and “Show Administrator menu” . By default I think the control center is more friendly to a new user especailly because of the categorising of configurations and it’s search abilities. As mentioned it does need some work to make it more usable (like my suggestion for recently accessed items) .

As linux becomes more and more userfriendly it has to cater to less technically able users, I see the Gnome control center as part of that. This will of course upset the technical users unless they can still customise it to focus on efficiency rather than ease of use.

I suggest there should be some kind of setting to put gnome into “Advanced user mode” this would just put the default settings to be the most efficient user experience rather than the most user friendly.

Ubuntu UK meeting 21/02/07

Ubuntu-uk had another meeting yesterday a couple of interesting things from it are:

• LoudMouthMan (Nik) works in a cupboard (see diagram)
  
• We’re going to do something for Comic Relief including a) A tube marathon the idea being “we’ll donate 10p if you take one of these ubuntu cds” (unconfirmed idea) b) changing our website to be all comic reliefy c) Sponsored bug fixing
• Have a buggy evening where we work on some bugs in feisty herd 5
• Get various running ubuntu-uk projects to give a short report at next meeting
• Make a skills page on the wiki
• Finding out about events people are going to or not that are relevant