Win98 -- all kidding aside

[Bart Silverstrim]

Jimmy Montague wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 13:33 -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote:

>> The pretty icon on your desktop is using mechanisms that, AS I STATED, 
>> weren't used then. They're RELATIVELY NEW. AND the floppy drive DOESN'T 
>> NOTIFY the OS when the media is altered, UNLIKE CD drives and USB buses.
>>
> 
> The pretty icon on my desktop WAS in common use back then. Windows 3.1
> and the Mac OS used it. OS-2 used it. The GUI itself was in common use
> at the time. 

*sigh*

I said GNOME wasn't in use then. And the icon on the Nautilus desktop 
represents mounted media, *NOT* the drive, which OS/2 and Win3.x 
represented. Remove the disk, the icon is there.

Stick a USB drive on your Ubuntu system, and the drive *appears* there. 
Unmount it, it goes away.

MacOS, as I recall, was tied to the hardware, which at the time did have 
sensors to alert the OS that media was inserted.

>All of those systems managed floppies with ease. Thus when
> the Linux people took up the challenge of developing a GUI, floppy
> management should have been one of the basics they accomplished at the
> start.

"Linux people" didn't. Argue with those brainless idiots in the labs at 
MIT. They worked on the concept of X Windows.

/sarcasm

BTW- disk management/filesystem management isn't generally part of the 
GUI concept. They're part of the operating system to handle.

And as I said...and others...Linux "handles" it fine. See the mount command.

>>> And so I say: Linux should from the very first have mastered the art of
>>> controlling a floppy drive. 
>> It works fine.
>>
> 
> For those who have never worked from the command line, it doesn't work
> at all. Ubuntu is a GUI on top of Linux. 

You argue a lot for not knowing the history of what you're talking 
about. Ubuntu is a distribution. NOT a GUI. Even if you didn't know what 
you were talking about the proof should be quite evident by looking at 
Ubuntu-Server, which by default HAS no GUI. And Kubuntu and Xubuntu have 
different default GUI's, and even then you can install the packages and 
have them live alongside your regular Ubuntu installation and switch at 
login.

>Maybe the developers' problem
> is that they still think of Linux in that way. They'd do better to get
> used to the idea that for 98 percent of the computer-using human race,
> the command line is some of that "creaky technology" upon which you heap
> your contempt. The message of the GUI is -- has always been -- that the
> command line is dead.

Your bitching was about the way the automounting of floppies worked. Now 
you're bitching about the GUI, a separate item. And I still suspect your 
overall gripe is something with the say Nautilus is interacting with the 
automatic mounting of media.

More to the point, since you like ruffling feathers by moaning about 
Ubuntu and how wonderful the other platforms were, why not go back to them?

>> "man mount".
>>
>> navigate to /mnt/<mountpoint.
>>
>> *tada*
>>
> 
> That makes absolutely no sense to me. I never found /mnt/<mountpoint. I
> did find a lot of supposedly useful information that might as well be
> written in Sanskrit.

How hard did you look?

Open a terminal, and slowly type "man mount" without the quotes. Read 
the documentation.

If your every reply is going to boil down to "I shouldn't have to do 
that to use this", then unsubscribe now.

>>> 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.
>> put in floppy.
>>
>> "mount /dev/floppy /mnt/floppy"
>> "cd /mnt/floppy"
>> "ls"
>>
> 
> So I just did that. And I get:
> root at cyanide:~# mount /dev/floppy /mnt/floppy
> mount: mount point /mnt/floppy does not exist

Oh dear. Why don't you install the opensshd package, open a forwarded 
port on your router, then post your IP, username, and password for me to 
go in and diagnose it for you?

Or you could apply some learning. Since it is *telling* you that 
/mnt/floppy doesn't exist, create the directory.

sudo mkdir /mnt/floppy

Then mount it.

sudo mount /dev/floppy /mnt/floppy

See what the errors tell you. Read the errors and either google it or 
read the messages, these are basic filesystem commands in Linux (and 
carry over largely to OS X as well).

> root at cyanide:~# cd /mnt/floppy
> bash: cd: /mnt/floppy: No such file or directory

This is just petulance. You had a clear error and continued on to prove 
what, illiteracy?

>> Oddly enough that isn't that different then what I was using in the 
>> 90's. Became simpler, as a matter of fact, since I'm not worrying as 
>> much about filesystem support or specifying filesystems.
>>
>> Can't do it anymore because none of my systems have floppies anymore.
>>
> 
> As I've just demonstrated using "terminal," you are right: You can't do
> it anymore and if my result means anything, you probably never could do
> it.

Ooh, right into the heart. Either I've been doing this longer than you 
have or you have a comprehension problem. I said I can't do it *anymore*.

> The reason I "hurled" certain statements at you is that you don't know
> what you're talking about. You can't tell me how to use the GUI to make
> Ubuntu mount a floppy with the name of my choice. You can't tell me how
> to use the GUI to format a floppy using the format of my choice.

I also can't tell you how to get rainbows to shoot out of your arse. But 
I did just tell you how to get a floppy to mount and get data off it, 
which was related to the problem you had, except for the part where the 
exact thing you wanted won't precisely work the way you exactly wanted.

You want to access the floppy? I told you how.

You want to bitch about a bug in the interface? File it, as you were 
also told by someone else, or migrate to another OS, or deal with it.

> You DID tell me how to use the command line to achieve precisely
> nothing. 

The feedback it gave you, namely the destination directory was missing, 
was apparently way too specific to help you out. Dude, if you can't 
read, go back to what you were much more comfortable with.

>> "use the mount command, do what is needed from /mnt/floppy, then unmount 
>> it. Otherwise you're probably dealing with a Nautilus problem or 
>> automounting problem..."
>>
> 
> There again, it's the creaky old command-line brain trying to solve a
> problem with the GUI using creaky old command-line solutions. New users
> are coming to Linux because Ubuntu and other such distros collectively
> boast that we don't need to use the command line any more. Seems the
> Ubuntu people forgot about mossbacks like you.

Why do people insist "Linux" is out to rule the 'verse? It's an OS, not 
a religion. It's open source, not a marketing movement.

If you are going to piss and moan and run away because it doesn't handle 
floppies in the way you like, and never even figure out *why* it's 
happening (which I already told you that the PC floppy doesn't handle 
media changes so it can't automatically tell differences, and the OS's 
you quoted as if you knew what you were talking about treat those icons 
as devices and not media) then there's really no tears shed by you leaving.

You came here right off the back sending flamebait. No one coming for 
help with something would, in their right mind, start out bitching that 
Win9x was better than XYZ and them archaic Linux people can't even get 
it right"...

>> Mount command. Another one to follow that up if you're going to insult 
>> me rather than ask what I'm talking about, "man mount".
>>
>> Nautilus? Not around in "93 or 94". Nor the automatic filesystem 
>> mounting system. Both new.
>>
> 
> This isn't 1994. Seems somebody forgot to tell you that, too.

You kept bringing it up. Forgot already?

You were saying Linux was around in 93/94, should have been able to 
handle floppies as they were popular then.

I said Nautilus and the automounting *wasn't* around then, and they work 
with the idea that the media is sensed when changed. Floppy drives don't 
do this.

Need me to type that a little slower?

> Thanks for treating me to a sample episode of the Mossback Linux
> Propaganda Hour.

Dude, if I'm a mossback, you must be 12.

> Is there anybody here who can make the Ubuntu GUI work with my floppy
> drive?

I'd love to see how others get the idea through to you.

-Bart