Auto-unmounting USB drives in Linux

One advantage that Windows has over Linux-like systems such as Ubuntu or Mac is that things can get into a real mess if external drives are removed without being properly ejected or unmounted first. This si a very important features when the Linux system will be used by non-technical people such as in a classroom or internet cafe.

DynUsb is a simple utility (only 13K of source code) which makes it safe to spontaneously pull devices out without any problem.

It seems to work really well, but if you've recently written to the drive, its still best to unmount in case not all cached data has been written.

Installation

Download the latest version from here. If you have a 32bit i386 architecture and are running a Debian based system such as Ubuntu or Mepis then you can install from the .deb, otherwise you'll need to download the source, unpack it and run make install in it's directory. It is extremely minimal and builds and starts almost instantly.