The new version of the most popular Linux distribution – Ubuntu – is brilliant. However there is one small problem I’ve come up against which is an annoyance. I rely a lot on external USB hard disks – for instance three video projects of mine recently required 200Gb of storage – more than you can fit inside a laptop.
When it comes to unmounting (i.e. safely disconnecting) a drive, the latest version of Ubuntu (called “Feisty”) seems to have an issue. It simply tells me it “cannot eject volume”. If I go behind the scenes and issue a “sudo umount /dev/sdb1” it’s fine, but (a) it’s annoying and (b) regular users wouldn’t have a clue about this.
There appears to be an unofficial fix for this. If you have the same problem, try entering this in a terminal (all on one line):
sudo mv
/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-storage-policy.fdi ~
Seems to work for me. I assume this will get fixed fairly quickly in an update.