Monday, December 15, 2008

Welcome to the libferris screencast on copy append.
1) I start a copy from the command line.
2) I decide I want to copy another file to the same place.
For example to the same USB stick.
3) In the old days, I would have to start a parallel copy
or wait for the first copy to finish before copying
the second file.
4) Now, with libferris, I can just append it to the existing copy task for this destination.


Unfortunately the video quality is not so good in the final web version. Still some fun and games to be had getting things up to scratch.



Untitled from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Automounting for the People

Now that the bad pun in the title has been read, you can't unread it!

So, now libferris has some closer HAL integration. Of course, some might say right away that ferris has been able to mount dbus for ages, so why have an explicit hal:// filesystem. The reason is that the fdo methods in the raw dbus interface for HAL are very coarse, and by explicitly having a hal:// and a volume manager daemon you get some interesting possibilities.

When the daemon can't work out what to do, it runs a nice little wizard:


One you choose how to identify the volume, you can tell libferris what to do:


More actions will arrive in time. I particularly like the auto copy mode, if a usb stick is readable at 20mb/s, a local scratch RAID-10 at 200Mb/s it makes sense to start moving the data to the scratch RAID right away and then pick it apart from there rather than from the USB stick directly.