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I installed Lubuntu 14.04 for someone who had an XP-era PC. He also
has a really, really old offline PC that he uses for a few familiar
programs, and wants to ferry some files back and forth between the
two PC's using floppies.<br>
<br>
This should be no problem, except that the floppy mounts in Lubuntu
with root ownership, and only root can change content, so ordinary
users cannot copy files to or edit files on a floppy.<br>
<br>
Someone somewhere (!) reported that the behavior could be duplicated
in a virtual machine with no actual floppy drive.<br>
<br>
Design behavior should be that the floppy mounts with the logged-in
user as owner, which is what happens with USB flash drives.<br>
<br>
As far as I can tell, this is a new instance of a regression in the
kernel and/or udisks2 that has previously been reported and fixed.<br>
<br>
See for instance:<br>
<a href="http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63849">udisks2
mounts floppy disk as root</a><br>
<a href="http://lkml.org/lkml/2014/5/28/297">Bug fix released</a><br>
<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=740190">udisks2:
mounts floppy always for root:root (not writable for normal users)</a><br>
<br>
I couldn't figure out how to get floppies to mount with the
logged-in user as owner, but I do have a sloppy workaround that sets
a permission to allows anyone to change content on the floppy. This
was inspired by comment #11 at <a
href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2222487&page=2">Floppies
mount fine, but can't seem to edit them in Xubuntu 14.04</a>.<br>
<br>
The sloppy workaround in my case is to add this line to /etc/fstab:<br>
/dev/fd0 /media/user1/disk vfat
rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks2,user,noauto,umask=0 0 0<br>
<br>
This will work fine in a one-user installation, but it fails in a
multi-user installation. With user2 as the logged in user, clicking
on Floppy Disk in pcmanfm to mount it causes the error: <br>
The specified directory '/media/user1/disk' is not valid.<br>
<br>
I would be happy to hear about it if someone can come up with an
improved workaround!<br>
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