Hello there,
I just received a phone call from Stef Bon, a fellow Dutchman who's been
working on a Fuse technology based module to make it easier, and more
transparent, to a user, to mount, navigate and use pluggable storage devices
and network resources like Samba shares.
While Stef is in a better position to describe the project, I'm going to take
a stab at providing a summary. Since Stef wrote a bunch of good documentation
on his project, please allow me to refer you to those pages:
http://linux.bononline.nl/linux/mount.md5key.new/
In short, this type of technology could move the user's desktop experience
forward a great deal as far as navigation experience goes.
For instance, and this is just one of many example scenarios listed in the
documentation, creating a "Shared Folder" for documents and files that all
users on a system can use is a little more difficult on Linux still then it is
on, say, a Windows XP Home edition workstation.
Very much the same goes for navigation to a freshly (automatically) mounted
USB thumb drive, that simply is not mounted within the user's home directory,
but instead causes the user to have to navigate through system folders (e.g.
/media/XXX/), even though a "1.8 GiB Filesystem" might show up in
"Places" -if
you use that navigation pane.
Stef would love to increase awareness about his project, and would appreciate
some constructive feedback. I'm glad to be able to make the introductions. I
think Stef's project has a very high potential, and so, if you're interested,
Stef would also appreciate some help in terms of further development.
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen