Version: (using KDE 4.0.3) Installed from: SuSE RPMs OS: Linux If one uses a picture from a removeable device as wallpaper or for the frame plasmoid it does not work because plasma does not mount the device, although it is attached. Amarok for example does somehow get access to the device's files.
Or at the very least an error message stating that a filesystem/directory is currently unavailable (in case it cannot automatically mount it like a missing USB key for example).
Do we really want to automount removable devices? Using pictures for wallpaper or the frame plasmoid from removable media is flaky at best.
Why should people not keep their photo on an external harddrive in times of image-files getting bigger and bigger? People do that in case of music too, which is why amarok handles this. Even if it would make sense that plasma copied some files to a temp-dir, having the slideshow simply demands that plasma copes with external drives. Same for folderview.
If you're using an external hard drive as extended main storage, I'd expect the use of things like fstab to mount the device at boot. Well, I'll downgrade this to minor, and if a dev wants to implement it they can, but I'm not sure it's an essential feature, and issues like not letting plasma stop people unmounting devices would need to be considered (not being able to remove a device because some application has kept a reference to it is one of my biggest problems with removable media support in Windows).
I think you are expecting the wrong thing. USB drive do not need fstab to be accessed, just like a CD/DVD drive... The partitions get detected at logon by KDE and are mounted in /media on the fly once accessed. It is sad you are considering this as minor since probably a lot of people are keeping their data on an external drive like this because of its ease of management and security it offers.
That's right, the frame applet doesn't support loading images from remote URLs currently
dupe of https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164053 ?
Merging with bug 164053 as it has more discussion on it. Thanks *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 164053 ***