My Computer Issues

Here is something that has baffled me extremely. Why is it so hard to (un)mount a cdrom in linux? In windows (and I'm sure MacOSX) you put it in, it's mounted, and pop it out and it's unmounted. (Or throw it in the trashcan, or has that changed now? :o)

In linux however, you push it in... and hopefully it's mounted... and when you pop it out... it's often unmounted... but then again... sometimes you have to do it manually... does forcing help? nope:

umount -f /mnt/cdrom

wont do the trick, however being lazy...

umount -l /mnt/cdrom

Does the trick... in most cases... okay I can understand forcing per default is a bad thing... but being lazy per default surely can't? or trying normal unmount first and when that fails trying lazy?

Okay. You cannot unmount a cdrom when someone is standing in that directory... WHY? because they might read from or try to write to an unmounted unit? How about a setting somewhere:

EXTREMELY_SAFE_AND_NICE_MULTIUSER_SYSTEM_SOMETHING_DESKTOP_LINUX_USERS_WONT_UNDERSTAND=true

That way we can have the don't-unmount-if-someone-is-standing-in-the-dir for the people that wants that and the rest of us can use our cdrom like we're used to: pop it in, ready to go, pop it out... not ready to go...

Or maybe ...

If cdrom tray open and user in cdrom dir then cd ..

That's a little like windows explorer behavior when you open the tray but it's not really that good. However it may be one viable option, along with a message: "the cdrom has been unmounted, we're now kindly moving you to the first dir that still exists ... cd /mnt/cdrom" .. however i'd go mad if i had that message popping up in konqueror for instance... it will do fine in a terminal though...

But I don't know... there may be things way beyond my horizon going on here....