WTF?! NO floppy in Lucid or in Meerkat!

[Tom H]

On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 1:17 PM, Rashkae <ubuntu at tigershaunt.com> wrote:
> Stephen Bungay wrote:
>> 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 think you misunderstand.  Floppy support was not intentionally killed
> per say.  Just an unfortunate effect of letting 'developers' with no
> access to a system that has a floppy drive for testing fiddle with the
> floppy mounting code to fix a boot delay issue.
>
> Not that I'm happy with the course of these events, but to play the
> devil's advocate, I can guarantee that systems built with no floppy
> drive (but with a BIOS configuration of one) are far more common place
> than people still using floppies. So while unfortunate that this was
> 'fixed' by completely unqualified people, I can see the how's and why's
> of it.

How can they be "completely unqualified people" is they fixed a
problem that affects more people than those who need to use a floppy
drive?! This problem mustn't be resolvable to everyone's satisfaction
if the developers chose to go this route (whether they have/had access
to a box with a floppy or not.

IIRC, Fedora 11 introduced code to prevent probing for a floppy drive
because it slowed down boot; it's a logical thing to do if you are to
cater for the majority and not the minority. I assume that Fedora now
has the same floppy-drive problems but since I haven't used a floppy
disk/drive in at least ten years, I don't know.