Usability: cannot change volume names

Bug #61966 reported by Alessandro Gervaso
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Nautilus
New
Undecided
Unassigned
nautilus (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Wishlist
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

Binary package hint: nautilus

These are the steps to reproduce it:

1) plug a drive (i.e. usb pendrive or similiar);
2) wait for it to be mounted on /media/$LABEL or /media/usbdisk if the partition isn't labeled;
3) open the "Computer" window;
4) right click on the "usbdisk" icon and select "properties";
5) the textfield containing the volume name is editable, so edit it and then press "enter" or click on the "close" button.

So, the textfield should appear as readonly if the user cannot edit the current object.
There is also a poor support for partitions labels: i could edit an ext3 label using "e2label" (it required root access) but the fastest way to edit a vfat label was to backup the data and reformat the volume passing the correct option to mkfs.
The only alternative would have been installing and configuring mtools.
Both the methods appear to be beyond the knowledge of the average user.
Should I open a different bug (to which package) for this one?

Revision history for this message
Caroline Ford (secretlondon) wrote :

Part 1 - This only happens if the user doesn't have rw access to the drive?

Revision history for this message
Alessandro Gervaso (gervystar) wrote :

I think that the label can be written only if the user has the permission to write directly on the block device and this isn't done by default.
If with "rw access to the drive" you mean rw access to the mountpoint I think it is the cause of the problem.

Revision history for this message
Alessandro Gervaso (gervystar) wrote :

Sorry for the double post.
I think that the correct beahviour should be this:

1) the user plugs an external drive;
2) hal should change the block device ownership to the current console user, in order to allow it to edit the partitions, format the drive etc...
3) the drive gets mounted
4) nautilus should have a wrapper to "e2label" and something similar to write on vfat partitions.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Thanks for your bug. That's somewhat similar to bug #41011. I'm opening an upstream task, if anybody wants to take that feature request upstream that's probably the right place to get that worked

Changed in nautilus:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
importance: Untriaged → Wishlist
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
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