WTF?! NO floppy in Lucid or in Meerkat!

[ms]

On 24/09/10 16:26, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 24 September 2010 16:02, ms<devicerandom at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>> I don't understand how could you insist that they maintain something
>> that they have no hardware to test on.
>>
>> It's sad, I understand, but it's also normal. Technologies come and go.
>> Floppy is a dead technology since years and years.
>
> Floppies are not extinct, are still in common use,

We have different definitions of "common". Anyway they could be as 
common as you want: if developers can't test them, they can't support them.

If you want floppy support, you can perhaps donate a machine with a 
floppy drive to an Ubuntu developer willing to work on that.

> and for quite a
> number of relatively modern machines that cannot boot from USB are
> still the most commonly-available easiest and cheapest boot media. To
> burn a CD for one use, such as re-Flashing a BIOS, and then throw it
> away is appalling environmental irresponsibility.

For one CD?! Please.

> I expect testing on desktop machines and I expect support for fairly
> recent legacy hardware. PS/2 ports, parallel&  serial ports, analogue
> VGA ports&  monitors, CDs as opposed to DVDs, the ISA bus, the
> parallel PCI buses, these are all "legacy" technology but still in
> use. I have a live P4 server with Cirrus graphics on an electronic PCI
> interface (physically, it's on the motherboard); I still expect such
> things to work.
>
> Also, it pays to be aware of the position of Linux and Ubuntu in the
> real world. It is a tiny minority OS in a world dominated by Windows
> and one commercial UNIX. One of the main uses for Linux for many
> people is to bring old PC hardware back to life, for which no licence
> is available for a commercial OS, or where it would be too expensive
> or modern commercial OSs too heavyweight. This is an important niche
> and should not be neglected.

I think you are not getting the point of the Linux *ecosystem*. There's 
plenty of Linux distributions that support all of this stuff and more.

But Ubuntu is not geared towards revitalizing old hardware. Ubuntu, as 
far as I understand it, is designed to be a modern OS running on 
relatively modern machines. I have personally run Linux (and FreeBSD) on 
64MB Pentium 1s, not more than three years ago. It wasn't Ubuntu, 
however. It wouldn't have been the right thing for the job, simply.

There is a world of Linux distros out there, even if Ubuntu pretty much 
shadowed a lot of them.

> No, but I *do* expect it to work on kit that meets the minimum
> requirements and kit that is (say) ten to 12 years old if it was of
> good specification at the time.
>
> A 64MB Pentium 1 from 1995, no. A 1GB P3 from 1998 or 1999, yes.

And... why is 10 to 12 years old your expectation?

10 years are *aeons* in computing. It isn't unreasonable at all, sad as 
it may be (because I love old hw myself) that some hardware of that age 
is no more actively supported by a standard modern desktop distribution.

m.