WTF?! NO floppy in Lucid or in Meerkat!

[Basil Chupin]

I've busted my balls over the past 2 days trying to figure out why my

floppy will not be recognised and display the contents of a floppy disc.

I need the floppy to be able to flash the BIOS on a pre-loved mobo I
bought 2 weeks ago.

I buggered around trying to figure out why the floppy (floppies actually
on all the 3 Ubuntu systems I have) won't work - when all did work under
the previous distro I was using.

And what do I now find?

The floppy drive is not really catered for by Ubuntu Lucid, or even
Meerkat (I've tried) now!

Here is a gem from a Lauchy discussion on this matter:

QUOTE

>  NoOp [2010-08-31 2:20 -0000]:
>  >  Can one of the devs listed in the assigned: Andy Whitcroft and
>  >  Martin Pitt please explain the status?
>
>  You already summarized it pretty well. None of the devs have a floppy
>  disk, so debugging them is a pain (as much of a pain as floppy disks
>  are in the first place..) Personally, the last one I had was 2002..
>
>  So for now, I'm afraid that you have to use an older Ubuntu release
>  for now, or use the downgraded version for a while.
>
>  I'm sorry that this isn't the answer you are looking for, but it's the
>  current situation.

UNQUOTE

Note: none of the devs computers with a floppy....so for all you silly
bums and no-hopers who do have one.....tuff teaties!

And for all those who still spout the line that Ubuntu will run on all
hardware -- get real! It's crap!

(Also, just FYI, and this might explain a few things, all the devs
appear to be using laptops, not desktops, for their work; this also
stated in this "bug thread".)

There are, however, at least a couple of "fixes" for the above wonderful
regression but one of them, which is to be issue on the cli,
"devkit-disks --mount /dev/fd0" comes up with the error message that
nobody on this planet knows the command "devkit-disks" except, most
likely, the one who actually mentioned it in the bug-discussion.

The first "fix" was to insert "floppy" as a new line in /etc/modules -
which went down like a lead balloon in my case.

And the last, is to replace in Lucid the latest udisks package from
ubuntu with the earlier udisks.1.0.1build1 (by using Package:Force
Version) -- this courtesy of NoOp. And, of course, there is no way that
you can do this Package:Force Version in Meerkat.

Alright, now that I have vented my frustrations accumulated over the
past 2 days, does anyone have a REAL clue to make anything-Ubuntu
recognise a floppy drive and display the contents of the disc in it and
even format the disc? (Having stated this, the suggestion in the
bug-discussion is to keep running an earlier version of Ubuntu - I think
it is Karmic but don't quote me.)

If you want to see all of this for yourself then here is the bug-discussion:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/udisks/+bug/441835

BC


PS I accidentally posted the above in the wrong mail list - opensuse - and the above is FWDed copy of that post.