Ubuntu: Eject Kindle

When plugging your Kindle into your computer via USB, it shows up as a drive and shuts down the device's operating system. The screen will tell you to "eject" the Kindle from your computer in order to use it and charge the battery through the USB cable. Thus it can either act as an external drive or be usable/charging, but not both. In Windows there is the simple tray option which allows you to "Safely Remove Hardware", satisfying the "ejection".

On Ubuntu it's not so simple. Clicking the little eject-looking icon in Nautilus (file browser) just dismounts the drive mapping, it doesn't actually eject the hardware (e.g. switch it to powered-only). To do this you'll have to drop down to the terminal and run the eject command:

sudo eject Kindle

If you've renamed it then the last argument may be something different. In order to find exactly where your device is mapped to run sudo fdisk -l, output is something like this:

Disk /dev/sda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xcccdcccd

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          26      204800    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              26        4182    33385472    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3            4183       11522    58958550    5  Extended
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda4           11523       12161     5125680   12  Compaq diagnostics
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5            4183        8031    30905280   83  Linux
/dev/sda6           11218       11522     2449881   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7            8031       11217    25598128+   b  W95 FAT32

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 1598 MB, 1598119936 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 48770 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 64 * 512 = 32768 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       48770     1560632    b  W95 FAT32

The Kindle's file system is FAT32 and I can tell from this that it is on /dev/sdb1 meaning I can also pass that to eject:

sudo eject /dev/sdb1

Hope this helps!