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Previous versions of Ubuntu had nice looking application called Ejecter:

Description: application to unmount easily and safely external devices Ejecter is a simple menu that sits in the system notification area, providing you a quick way to unmount an external peripheral such as USB pendrive, CD/DVD disk, external hard disk and so. . Ejecter will sleep behind the scenes and show an icon in the system tray when one or more devices are connected to your computer.

It places its icon in notification area and allow to detach USB-device as in MS Windows. See screenshots (from here):

Ejecter active Ejecter did safely remove

But is was removed from repositories since 14.04 LTS.

Is it possible to make Ejecter working on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS or 18.04 LTS?

Preferable I need solution for MATE DE.

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2 Answers 2

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Other methods (but out-the-box)

Disk Mounter applet

As @DKBose has noted, on Ubuntu MATE you can use other method.
All current versions have Disk Mounter applet (from mate-applets package):

Disk Mounter applet

it is very compact on the MATE Panel Disk Mounter applet on mate-panel and
allows to mount, unmount and eject media: Disk Mounter applet options

Note: Disk Mounter applet does not spin-off (spin-down) USB HDDs.

Caja

Standard MATE file-manager (Caja) allows to Eject, Unmount, and (for some devices) to Safely Remove Drive from Devices section

Caja Devices

and from drop-down menu:

Caja Device drop-down menu

and from desktop:

Eject or Safely remove from desktop (maintained by Caja)

Here Safely Remove Drive removes power from USB-flash (switches LED off) and spin-downs USB-HDD.

GNOME Disks

If other methods fail, then you can install gnome-disk-utility package and use GNOME Disks (gnome-disks executable) application to mount, unmount and power off the drive:

GNOME Disks to power off the drive

Ejecter (original problem)

Yes, it is possible. But we need to get some packages from 12.04 LTS repositories manually:

mkdir ~/Downloads/ejecter
cd ~/Downloads/ejecter
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/u/udev/libudev0_175-0ubuntu9.10_amd64.deb
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/p/parted/libparted0debian1_2.3-19ubuntu1_amd64.deb
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/u/udisks/udisks_1.0.5-1_amd64.deb
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gnome-disk-utility/libgdu0_3.0.2-2ubuntu7_amd64.deb
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/e/ejecter/ejecter_0.4.4-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb

then for 14.04 LTS use 

sudo dpkg -i --force-all *.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

or for 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS

sudo apt-get install ./*.deb

Then log-out and log-in again.

Connect USB-flash or HDD and you will get Ejecter icon in the notification area.

To eject the device click on the Ejecter icon, then on appropriate device name and it will be safely removed from the system.

Ejecter is alive Ejecter removed device

Notes:
1. Ejecter does not spin-down external USB hard disks. Use GNOME Disks (gnome-disks or from Applications→Accessories→Disks) for this purpose.
2. This solution was tested on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (MATE, Unity and GNOME FlashBack) Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (MATE, Unity and GNOME FlashBack), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (MATE, Unity, GNOME FlashBack, GNOME sHell).

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  • I just installed Ubuntu Mate 18.04.1 and there's an applet called disk mounter. It's available as part of the default install. If you add that to your panel, various partitions and devices will appear in your panel. The mounted one will have a little green tag in the lower right corner of its icon. If you click on a mounted device, you'll see an option to open it or to unmount it. I don't know if this process safely "spins down" the drive. But Mate's file manager (and desktop) offers a "Safely Remove" option when you right-click on a device.
    – DK Bose
    Sep 15, 2018 at 12:30
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    @DKBose thank you! I forgot about Disk Mounter. Added your observations to the answer.
    – N0rbert
    Sep 15, 2018 at 14:14
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    My 18.04 Caja (I think) file browser only lists Eject as an option. So much for safety ;-/. . But a great post, thanks for all the details and pictures!
    – shellter
    Jan 30, 2019 at 22:52
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You can try these commands in a terminal: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fredp/ppa ,sudo apt-get update ,sudo apt-get install ejecter

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  • This PPA does not have packages for current Ubuntu releases. So this is not an option. But I a have already contacted the developer about releasing packages for modern Ubuntu versions.
    – N0rbert
    Sep 15, 2018 at 14:30
  • oh, so then i was wrong. ok thats great
    – Darealboi2090 YT
    May 27, 2019 at 21:37

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