Win98 -- all kidding aside

[Jimmy Montague]

On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 09:15 -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote:
> Jimmy Montague wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 21:55 -0700, Pastor JW wrote:
> >> On Friday 25 July 2008 01:58:23 am Mario Spinthiras wrote:
> >>> I'm sure there are reasons to run Microsoft products , I just haven't been
> >>> able to think of any for the past 15 years :)
> >> I thought I had found one a couple years ago but I was wrong,  merely a case 
> >> of believing windoze couldn't possibly be as bad as everybody said it was.  
> >> In truth, it was even worse.
> >>
> >>
> >> -- 
> >> 73 de N7PSV aka Pastor JW <n><   PDGA# 35276
> >> http://the-inner-circle.org
> >> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_original_inner_circle
> >> http://h.webring.com/hub?ring=universalministr
> >>
> > 
> > Win98 had its good features -- and some bad ones. I remember when I
> > first installed Win98, it was able to access floppy drives with no help
> > from me at all. As a home user, the worst problem I had with my new
> > Win98 system was that I couldn't shut it off.
> > 
> > By contrast, I've had Ubuntu in this box for two weeks, now, and I'm
> > still trying to make it handle my floppy drive correctly. That any
> > flavor of Linux should be unable to handle floppies correctly, out of
> > the box, after the OS has been nearly 20 years in development speaks
> > volumes about the quality of the Linux development process. Those
> > enraged by that statement may get their ire cooled somewhat by my
> > admission that, also unlike Win98, Ubuntu is easy to shut off.
> 
> I don't know...until recently, Linux didn't really use automounting of 
> volumes, so the whole model has changed. Couple that with the fact that 
> today the majority of temporary storage comes from USB drives and CD's, 
> both of which sense when media has changed as opposed to floppies which 
> are very limited in storage capacity and reliability to begin with, let 
> alone don't sense when media is inserted and thus force a user to tell 
> Linux "Hey, this changed!" makes the complaint more akin to bitching 
> that linux won't read my tapes without hassle (yeah, the old TRS and 
> Commodore days of yore seem to have passed me by...)
> 
> It's still possible today to do it the old fashioned way; use the mount 
> command, do what is needed from /mnt/floppy, and then unmount it. 
> Otherwise you're probably dealing with a Nautilus problem or 
> automounting problem with a medium that should have gone by the wayside 
> a long time ago.
> 
I remember being in a computer shop in 1993 or 94 (I forget just which)
and seeing Linux for sale on CD for an insignifican amount, like $1.69
or some such. 

CDs were new at the time. I remember I didn't yet have a CD drive on my
big, snortin' 12-mhz, 286 w/16 mb of RAM and a 40 mb hdd. I wanted to
try it, but I was told this "Linux thing" wouldn't run on a 286. I had
to have a 386 if I wanted to run Linux.

So Linux had been released to the public at that time. It was in
development at that time. And at that time, floppy drives were as common
as the fleas in your underwear, Mr. Silverstrim. The floppy was then and
remained for several years thereafter the most common means of getting
data in and out of a PC.

And so I say: Linux should from the very first have mastered the art of
controlling a floppy drive. As far as I can tell, Linux has never done
so. Having tried several flavors of Linux over the years (Red Hat,
Mandrake, Mandriva, Xandros, Caldera, several other flavors whose names
I cannot recall, Ubuntu, Kbuntu, and now Ubuntu again), I can also say
that I'm unaware of any Linux distro that ever handled floppy drives
with the ease that MacIntosh (another Unix system) and the PC have
always accomplished that chore.

If YOU know how to make Ubuntu 8.04 perform with floppies, Mr.
Silverstrim, I'd suggest you explain how to do so rather than autoboot
into a state of denial or start throwing rhetorical sandbags about how
wonderful Linux is and how unreasonable I am to ask a modern OS to
perform a task that ought to be so simple. As far as I can tell, my
asking Ubuntu to manage floppies is like asking Einstein to manage a
ball-peen hammer.

So, Mr. Silverstrim: Can you tell me how to make Ubuntu manage my floppy
drive or not? If the answer is not, then point me to someone who can do
so or butt out of this thread.

I'd do as much for you.

Jimmy

> As for the development process I think the fact that some university 
> kid's spare time project now being used in everything from the tiny EEE 
> PC to multi-million dollar data centers handling major infrastructure 
> services speaks volumes.
>