WTF?! NO floppy in Lucid or in Meerkat!

[Stephen Bungay]

On 09/24/2010 02:35 AM, Basil Chupin wrote:
> 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.
>

   Surprising the user-base with stuff like this is just wrong. While 
1.44MB is no longer a useful amount for the bloatware of today, there 
are legacy systems to port and a real need for the humble floppy disc to 
be available for use. The lunacy of the argument for removing it becomes 
apparent when you consider that a USB floppy-disk drive works perfectly.

> 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..
>>
     I humbly suggest they go out and buy one as they are not expensive.

>>   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.
>
>
>