Bug 145843

eject-2.0.13-10
nautilus-2.8.1-4
redhat-menus-3.7.1-1.fc3


Right now...

When there is a CD-ROM mounted, you can eject it by:
 - Right-clicking on the CD icon on the desktop and selecting "Eject"
 - Running "eject" at the command line

When there is no CD-ROM mounted, you can open the drive tray by typing
"eject" at the command line.

You can close the CD-ROM tray by typing "eject -t" at the command
line, if your hardware supports this operation.

There is no easy way that I know of to intentionally lock or unlock
the drive tray.

--

I have a laptop which I carry in a travel case.  When moving the
computer in or out of its case, it's very easy to accidentally hit the
"eject" button on the CD-ROM drive.  If I'm not careful, this could
easily result in serious damage to the hardware if the edge of the
drive gets caught on part of the bag.

So I desperately needed a way to software-lock my CD-ROM drive at
will.  After about an hour of poking around online and tweaking the
code I found at

http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=194848
a.k.a. http://zentara.net/perlplay/cdrom-tray-control-inline-c.html

...I had myself a working command that can lock and unlock (and eject
and theoretically close) my drive.

--

It seems to me that CD-ROM users in general and especially laptop
users, could benefit from a graphical method to lock, unlock, and
close their drives.  After looking at the existing facilities, it also
seems that the "eject" command might benefit from being accessible in
more places.  This would help keep it near the other CD-ROM commands
when appropriate, and also make it possible to open the drive when it
is empty.

There are several places worth thinking about putting a hook into some
or all of the {eject, close, lock, unlock} commands:
 - On the Actions menu.
 - In the file browser, when right-clicking on the CD-ROM drive, or
   when viewing its properties.
 - In the file browser, on the File menu, when browsing files on a
   mounted CD-ROM.
 - On the menu you get when you right-click on a mounted CD-ROM's
   desktop icon.
 - Applications that use CDs and DVDs (like burning or music software)

In an ideal world, certain graphical options would either not be
present or would be grayed out if they are not actionable.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there's a reliable way to determine
this.  For example, my /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info claims "Can close
tray: 1", but my drive is not physically capable of doing so on its
own.

Also note that "eject" should imply "unmount file systems, unlock, and
eject".