why do some PNDs get mounted automatically?


romanaOne

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Sometimes, I can't unmount SD cards because there are one or two PND files mounted under utmp.

df at the terminal shows they're mounted. The SD card is formatted FAT32.

Funny thing is, it is not ones I'm using. eg. I downloaded PanMame and hadn't gotten around to actually installing any ROMs but for some reason the PND is mounted. Why? (I remember a special MAME ROM version hell and decided to go play some SNES games instead. :p )
 
Yeah, I've experienced that too, although I hadn't noticed when stuff gets mounted - just noticed that when I wanted to unmount my card, I couldn't because a couple of PNDs appdata's were mounted. I ummed-and-aahed about it for a minute, then just ripped the card out - the PNDs themselves are mounted read-only, it's only the appdata (settings and stuff) that I'm risking.


Nowadays my cards never leave the Pandora. It's a networked computer, so it's often easier to just scp or rsync stuff off another machine on the network (though I'll admit the Pandora's flakey wifi does make that a little more frustrating than it would otherwise be).


You can also set the Pandora to act as a mass storage device, and plug it into your main computer using a USB cable.
 
While there is definatly an automounter for SD-cards, there is no auto-mounter for PND. Mounting a PND (without starting it) requiere a given set of parameters to pnd_run.sh that are coded nowhere in the system.

So either the pnds got started accidentaly and you stopped it or maybe there is black magic around your pandoras :D
 
Sometimes you can umount the loopback devices and sometimes you can't.

I was thinking maybe minimenu had mounted PNDs to get the preview image.

I pretty much live in minimenu. The xfce gui is too businesslike for me; I can better concentrate on game playing in minimenu. One does not want to get distracted and do work. (Terminal/vi and emelfm2 are enough for moving files into place and editing for the more fiddly emulators.)
 
ok, I just booted up my Pandora from having been shutdown. I'd taken the card out to make a backup copy of all my PNDs, app data, DOS games, etc.

I put the card back in and booted to minimenu. I went to the terminal first thing and found oolite to be mounted at /dev/loop0. It isn't always the same pnd.

This time I umounted /mnt/utmp/oolite. It took two tries:

First, I got the error:


auplink:plink.c:223: AUFS_CTL_PLINK_MAINT: Inappropriate ioctl for device.
df showed that it was still mounted, so I tried umount /mnt/utmp/oolite again and this time it worked without error.

That was the last thing I installed, before shutting down.
 
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You could try to rule some things out:

- try to live in/with the "business world" for some time, install and work with some pnds, to see if the behaviour is the same

- how do you "install" the pnds (download on pc, copy to Pandora or via PNDManager or PNDStore) ? Try a different method.
 
At first, I just copied a few to the SD card. But that rapidly becomes a mess so I started using PNDManager.

Where did minimenu come from anyway? Is it some old window manager like fwvm or afterstep stripped down and oddly themed?

(Xfce existed before pandora, so I assume minimenu did too.)

I don't often eject my left-hand SD card anymore.  At first I was doing it a lot because I was trying out some games in DOSBox and QEMU.  Still, just curious.

btw, should I format ext3 or 4 on the SD cards instead of fat32? I didn't think it would matter much and it would be a pain b/c then I could only use them with Linux.
 
Minimenu was written specifically for the Pandora, to ease in people used to the GP2X's menu system and the likes.

Having fat-formatted partitions can occasionally complicate things because you can't have hard links on fat partitions, but generally it doesn't matter to the Pandora what you use, and anything that needs hard links to work ought to be fixed, as a lot of people use fat-formatted partitions.
 
I don't often eject my left-hand SD card anymore.  At first I was doing it a lot because I was trying out some games in DOSBox and QEMU.  Still, just curious.
You could put the Pandora into mass storage mode to achieve that too.
 
I also sometimes find residual mounts of PNDs after a few days of usage.  Havent figured out yet what causes them.
 
I also sometimes find residual mounts of PNDs after a few days of usage.  Havent figured out yet what causes them.
I've noticed that the fuse.gvfs daemon is usually responsible for keeping a PND mounted,  because it seems to keep a file open in the mount directory for no apparent reason, which keeps the unmount process from working,  and pnd_run eventually gives up trying to do so.

- Neelix
 
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