Beginner Q1: Linux incapable of handling FDD? CONCLUDED

[Thomas Blasejewicz]

Good evening
Thank you for all your advice.
Apparently many people CAN use floppys - I cannot; after trying for 
several months.

"When you say you can't get your Floppy diosk drive to work in Linux
what exactly are you trying to do with it?" -> Just pop a FD in, read, 
write, maybe format it, pop it out. That's it.

"Start a terminal window from "Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal" 
and type the command)
1) Output of "uname -a"
2) Output of "lspci"
3) Output of "lsmod -a"
or
sudo mkdir /mnt/floppy
sudo mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy"

Well, I did ask the same question before on the OpenSUSE forum and went 
through a very long list of such instructions that in the end became so 
technical that I could not follow any longer.
This question of mine actually started a sort of holy war among the 
users there about what is right and what wrong. So, in the end I 
withdrew my question and apologized to the list for asking it.

Both my hardware (FDD) and the disks themselves are fine. Verified.
Under SUSE following one of the advised very complex procedures I 
actually succeeded in reading a floppy once. Every second effort failed.
The official documentation (for SUSE that are 4 PDF files with a total 
of 1000 pages) and a number of reference books I downloaded actually do 
not show any information pertaining to "mounting a floppy" (as far as I 
could find). I tried to search for things like "format a floppy". 
Information = 0.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/206860
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/253842
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=525573

There appear to be quite some problems.
This is what I cannot understand: FDD are "ancient" devices that should 
NOT pose any technical problem. Pop in a floppy, read it. That is 
something I did on many computers using several OS in the past 25 years 
and never even heard of this being able to cause problems (unless the 
machine is broken).

Conclusion: apparently at least I am too stupid to use floppys under 
Linux. So, I gave up trying. Although it would be very useful to me, if 
I were able to.

I am NOT trying to any other OS, PC etc., but if Linux is really to good 
(so much better than ...), I think something as simple as using a floppy 
should be possible - as long as both media and drives are around.

I consider the matter now closed and really hope, I did not disturb the 
list too much.