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When a removable media is mounted in KDE it can normally unmounted without greater problems. But sometimes this doesn't work because an application still uses the device and it is quite hard to figure out which application still uses the device. Sometimes a buggy process owns the device of an application you don't even see.

First of all a better error message would be nice. Something like this:
"The usb stick couldn't be unmounted because the process
amarok
still uses the device."

Then buttons labeled with "kill" should be next to the listed processes. When you click the button the process gets killed. Perhaps the user should be asked for confirmation.

+1 for this

This is definitely something I'd want to see implemented, I've had a device refuse to unmount more than a couple times for no apparent reason.

sceazy wrote:This is definitely something I'd want to see implemented, I've had a device refuse to unmount more than a couple times for no apparent reason.

Yeah, same here.

Great idea !

It would be nice to have a box allowing us to chose which process we should kill and which we shouldn't (so we can kill the ones we don't care about, and take care by ourselves of the important ones).

What about reusing the system monitor from krunner to show what is using the media?

Yep, this would be a good way to avoid useless code.

This should be doable not only for mounted devices but for every devices (like a webcam, which could be use by a process the user left).

Maybe this could be implemented into the device notifier: something like a plasma pop-up saying:
"[something] is still using this device!
Click the X to close [something]."
Then the unmount icon could be replaced with a big, red X. That way, users accustomed to this behaviour can just click and click again without moving the mouse.

Wasn't there something like this in KDE3?

Its a great idea nevertheless

killing stuff that wants to write can cause data loss. so i'd give other options too

switch to - to give focus (and open on the screen) the application that uses the drive. so the user can see if he has to save something first etc

close - to quit the process nicely (imitates clicking the X on the window) - if the app decides to ask 'do you want to save' etc the user sees this window and can click

kill (or shift-close) - to kill the process

the close / kill button can be colored depending on kde's estimate of how safe its to kill the process : black for process that is safe to kill. red to process that is not very safe. striped red and yellow to process that has data transfer in progress (and can cause more damage if killed - especially if there is fragmented ntfs drive etc)

++ to madman's suggestion

With you Ash - I like the switch to option

If we use SIGTERM or SIGINT instead of SIGKILL, won't the application get the focus by themselves and ask for saving data, or close by themselves if nothing is to save ?

Applications can catch these signal, so I guess they do it.
It would be just like when you shut down the computer.

Keep in mind it\'s also possible for a process owned by a different user to be accessing the device. That could complicate this some.

For me, it would be enough to show the offending processes and let me choose which one to kill or not.

Angel Blue01 wrote:Wasn\'t there something like this in KDE3?

Its a great idea nevertheless

Yeah, I believe we had this in KDE 3. Wasn\'t very pretty but it did work. This could be done with integration with ksysguard, as was suggested above. Guess it just needs someone to go and do it...