Strange behavior with flashdrive?

[TangentDelta]

I got my Pandora about 2 weeks ago, and I've really been enjoying it. I've been too lazy to get an SDcard to use in it, so I've been using a flashdrive as my main PND system. The only problem I found is that after ~3 times of mounting and un-mounting my drive, the Pandora no-longer recognizes the PNDs, so I have to restart the system.


I'm making sure to "unmount" the flash drive before I remove it (sort of a habit because of my mac). If it's a problem with using the flash drive instead of an SD card, I'll try to buy an SD card when I feel like it.

 

[skeezix]

When you mount the 4th+ (whatever) time and the pnds are not found .. is the flash itself found? (ie: if you're using xfce, does it come up on the desktop? Or using Thunar or the shell, can you see the flash drive, despite not seeingf tyhe pnds automatically found?)


If the flash drive is found, what name does it have in /media ?


jeff

 

[TangentDelta]

When you mount the 4th+ (whatever) time and the pnds are not found .. is the flash itself found? (ie: if you're using xfce, does it come up on the desktop? Or using Thunar or the shell, can you see the flash drive, despite not seeingf tyhe pnds automatically found?)


If the flash drive is found, what name does it have in /media ?


jeff

The flash drive shows up on the desktop, and in the media folder, with its correct name.


Edit: The flash ddrive is named "Pithos", for obvious reasons.

 

[WizardStan]

Open a terminal and type

cd /media/Pithos/pandora/apps

touch foo

assuming "Pithos" is correctly cased, and everything is stored in apps. If they're in menu, or desktop, substitute accordingly.


The important thing is creating a file (foo) to trigger an event causing a scan of the directory. That should, in theory, get it to display the PNDs, and help work towards a probable cause.

 

[TangentDelta]

Open a terminal and type

cd /media/Pithos/pandora/apps

touch foo

assuming "Pithos" is correctly cased, and everything is stored in apps. If they're in menu, or desktop, substitute accordingly.


The important thing is creating a file (foo) to trigger an event causing a scan of the directory. That should, in theory, get it to display the PNDs, and help work towards a probable cause.

Yeah, scanning the directory fixes it. Is there a way to automatically refresh the whole device when it is mounted?

 

[WizardStan]

It's supposed to do it automatically.


Now that I think about it, I've encountered this probably occasionally myself since I started using the latest SuperZaxxon with SD cards. Sometimes I'll put in a card and my menu items won't automatically appear even though the desktop ones do. I never thought much about it, just ejected the SD card and tried again and it always worked. Does your problem consistently happen, that you get 3 uses and then the 4th and on don't automatically appear? Or is it just something random that seems to happen 25% of the time? Is it just one directory or all (assuming you put some stuff in desktop, some in menu, etc...)?

 

[TangentDelta]

It's supposed to do it automatically.


Now that I think about it, I've encountered this probably occasionally myself since I started using the latest SuperZaxxon with SD cards. Sometimes I'll put in a card and my menu items won't automatically appear even though the desktop ones do. I never thought much about it, just ejected the SD card and tried again and it always worked. Does your problem consistently happen, that you get 3 uses and then the 4th and on don't automatically appear? Or is it just something random that seems to happen 25% of the time? Is it just one directory or all (assuming you put some stuff in desktop, some in menu, etc...)?

Seems to happen 25% of the time to be honest, and it's the whole directory. My Pandora came shipped with Super Zaxxon on it, so maybe it's a bug in the firmware?

 

[skeezix]

Was talking to someone in IRC the other day ..


He had xfce not get repopulated with the entries.


We turned on pndnotifyd logging (add -l into the invocation, in /etc/init.d/pndnotifd or whatever) and tail -f /tmp/pndnotifyd.log in a shell, and start insert/ejecting or other actions (downlaoding a new pnd, copying/moving one around, etc.)


pndnotifyd in his case was waking up and spitting out the .desktop files in the right places, and they looked good (so its job was done!) -- and xfce was _not seeing them_ occasionally.


ie: Once we spit the files out, we're done .. xfce has an inotify watch on the directory (such as /usr/share/applications), and is supposed to wake up when it gets touched.


I didn't look into it further, but I wonder if we've bumped to a newer xfce and they've broken something slightly?


jeff