I have recently had difficulty in safely removing a 1TByte external (USB connected) hard drive. Under 'Configure your Desktop > Workspace Appearance and Behavior > Desktop search' I have set 'Removable Media Handling' to 'Ignore all removable media', and under Hardware > Removable Devices I have disabled automatic mounting of removable storage media. Nevertheless, attempts to safely remove the drive result in an error message claiming that 'one or more files on this device are open within an application'

A test with
lsof /media/Volume

when the only thing done on the Device Notifier was to click 'Open with File Manager' gives a number of lines with a single PID relating to nepomukse.
Using kill -9 <PID> to stop the process still doesn't allow me to safely remove the drive, because a new nepomukse process is created, thus taking me back to square one.

Short of using CTRL+PRTSCN+S,U,B I have found no way, other than waiting for more than 15 minutes, to get the drive safely removed.

Any advice on this one would be welcome.

Peter N

What version of the KDE Workspaces and platform are you using?

I think it's this bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=304943

See http://userbase.kde.org/Nepomuk/RemovableMediaHandling for a workaround.

Einar,

In answer to your specific question, my platform runs KDE 4.9.5 (he latest version in the repositories of PCLinuxOS) on a desktop PC with an Asus M5A78L-M LX v2 motherboard, ‎AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 processor and 4 GByte DIMM RAM. The external HDD is connected directly to one of the integrated USB sockets.

The first link you included in your post clearly describes the problem I am having, and the second looks hopeful - apart from the fact that I can't find the nepomukstrigirc file either in a Dolphin-based search, or via 'whereis' in Konsole. It's not in /etc on my machine, where I would normally expect to find configuration files. So, two questions:

1] Where should nepomukstrigirc be?

2] If it doesn't exist, can I simply create a one-line file in that directory with the fix in it?

Peter N

You can probably find the file "nepomukstrigirc" in either ~/.kde4/share/config or ~/.kde/share/config (depending on your distribution).

In any case, you can ensure the file is created, with the appropriate values by running the following command:

Code: Select all

kwriteconfig --file nepomukstrigirc --group RemovableMedia --key "add watches" --type bool false

Thanks for the advice on locating nepomukstrigirc. I amended the existing file to add 'add watches = false' as follows:

[Devices]
filex://dc44c6cc44c6a89a=false

[General]
exclude filters=*~,*.part,*.o,*.la,*.lo,*.loT,*.moc,moc_*.cpp,cmake_install.cmake,CMakeCache.txt,CTestTestfile.cmake,libtool,config.status,confdefs.h,autom4te,conftest,confstat,Makefile.am,*.csproj,*.m4,*.rej,*.gmo,*.pc,*.omf,*.aux,*.tmp,*.po,*.vm*,*.nvram,*.rcore,lzo,litmain.sh,*.orig,.histfile.*,.xsession-errors*,*.class,*.pyc,*.elc,po,CVS,.svn,.git,_darcs,.bzr,.hg,CMakeFiles,CMakeTmp,CMakeTmpQmake,core-dumps,lost+found
exclude filters version=2
exclude folders[$e]=
folders[$e]=$HOME
index hidden folders=false

[RemovableMedia]
add watches=false
ask user=false
index newly mounted=false

but I still have the same problem of the external drive being 'held captive' by nepomukse. Any ideas?

Did you logout and back in again after applying the configuration change?

In a word, yes.

I'm sorry. The fix on that page is only for 4.10 or greater. In your case you have no other option but to switch of the filewatch service when you want to unmount something -

qdbus org.kde.nepomuk.services.nepomukfilewatch /servicecontrol shutdown

Thanks vHanda. I've just checked the PCLinuxOS Forum and find that their distro developers have today just announced the availability of KDE 4.10.0, so it looks as if I'm in luck.

Peter N

Just to confirm that having upgraded to KDE 4.10.0 the fix in nepomukstrigirc now works.