Win98 -- all kidding aside

[Aart Koelewijn]

On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:10:00 -0500, Jimmy Montague wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 09:15 -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote:
>> Jimmy Montague wrote:
>> > On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 21:55 -0700, Pastor JW wrote:
>> >> On Friday 25 July 2008 01:58:23 am Mario Spinthiras wrote:
>> >>> I'm sure there are reasons to run Microsoft products , I just
>> >>> haven't been able to think of any for the past 15 years :)
>> >> I thought I had found one a couple years ago but I was wrong, 
>> >> merely a case of believing windoze couldn't possibly be as bad as
>> >> everybody said it was. In truth, it was even worse.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> 73 de N7PSV aka Pastor JW <n><   PDGA# 35276
>> >> http://the-inner-circle.org
>> >> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_original_inner_circle
>> >> http://h.webring.com/hub?ring=universalministr
>> >>
>> >>
>> > Win98 had its good features -- and some bad ones. I remember when I
>> > first installed Win98, it was able to access floppy drives with no
>> > help from me at all. As a home user, the worst problem I had with my
>> > new Win98 system was that I couldn't shut it off.
>> > 
>> > By contrast, I've had Ubuntu in this box for two weeks, now, and I'm
>> > still trying to make it handle my floppy drive correctly. That any
>> > flavor of Linux should be unable to handle floppies correctly, out of
>> > the box, after the OS has been nearly 20 years in development speaks
>> > volumes about the quality of the Linux development process. Those
>> > enraged by that statement may get their ire cooled somewhat by my
>> > admission that, also unlike Win98, Ubuntu is easy to shut off.
>> 
>> I don't know...until recently, Linux didn't really use automounting of
>> volumes, so the whole model has changed. Couple that with the fact that
>> today the majority of temporary storage comes from USB drives and CD's,
>> both of which sense when media has changed as opposed to floppies which
>> are very limited in storage capacity and reliability to begin with, let
>> alone don't sense when media is inserted and thus force a user to tell
>> Linux "Hey, this changed!" makes the complaint more akin to bitching
>> that linux won't read my tapes without hassle (yeah, the old TRS and
>> Commodore days of yore seem to have passed me by...)
>> 
>> It's still possible today to do it the old fashioned way; use the mount
>> command, do what is needed from /mnt/floppy, and then unmount it.
>> Otherwise you're probably dealing with a Nautilus problem or
>> automounting problem with a medium that should have gone by the wayside
>> a long time ago.
>> 
> I remember being in a computer shop in 1993 or 94 (I forget just which)
> and seeing Linux for sale on CD for an insignifican amount, like $1.69
> or some such.
> 
> CDs were new at the time. I remember I didn't yet have a CD drive on my
> big, snortin' 12-mhz, 286 w/16 mb of RAM and a 40 mb hdd. I wanted to
> try it, but I was told this "Linux thing" wouldn't run on a 286. I had
> to have a 386 if I wanted to run Linux.
> 
> So Linux had been released to the public at that time. It was in
> development at that time. And at that time, floppy drives were as common
> as the fleas in your underwear, Mr. Silverstrim. The floppy was then and
> remained for several years thereafter the most common means of getting
> data in and out of a PC.
> 
> And so I say: Linux should from the very first have mastered the art of
> controlling a floppy drive. As far as I can tell, Linux has never done
> so. Having tried several flavors of Linux over the years (Red Hat,
> Mandrake, Mandriva, Xandros, Caldera, several other flavors whose names
> I cannot recall, Ubuntu, Kbuntu, and now Ubuntu again), I can also say
> that I'm unaware of any Linux distro that ever handled floppy drives
> with the ease that MacIntosh (another Unix system) and the PC have
> always accomplished that chore.

If I remember well, I installed my first Linux (Slackware) from floppy's 
on a 486, and later also installed Linux from floppy's on a number dual 
boot laptop's, 386/486? , 4 Mb ram, 80 Mb hd, which only had floppy 
drives (no X on those off course). I never had any problems with floppy's 
under Linux, but then, the last time I used them is many years ago. My 
present desktop and laptop don't even have floppy drives. They have card 
readers instead (SD cards mostly).

Aart