Win98 -- all kidding aside

[Bart Silverstrim]

Jimmy Montague wrote:

> 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. 

I believe Linux was announced as a "non minix" in 91. Slack came out in 
93. Maybe that's what you saw.

> 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 the interweb was around then too. Tape drives used to be popular as 
well. Terminals were more popular than PCs for decades. What is your 
point? Because it *used* to be popular we have to keep that albatross 
around our collective necks forever?

*Constant* backwards compatibility, never severing ties to ancient 
technology, adds complexity. Floppies are bad for storage, 
period...unreliable, and don't hold much data at all, and bang-for-buck 
it's simply cheaper to use a USB drive of some form to hold your data.

More than that, LINUX WAS AROUND THEN, GNOME WASN'T.

And I also stated to stick the @#$@# floppy, "mount" it to something 
like /dev/floppy, and do what LINUX USED TO DO BACK IN THE 90'S to get 
your data.

The pretty icon on your desktop is using mechanisms that, AS I STATED, 
weren't used then. They're RELATIVELY NEW. AND the floppy drive DOESN'T 
NOTIFY the OS when the media is altered, UNLIKE CD drives and USB buses.

> And so I say: Linux should from the very first have mastered the art of
> controlling a floppy drive. 

It works fine.

"man mount".

navigate to /mnt/<mountpoint.

*tada*

>As far as I can tell, Linux has never done
> so. 

It's right in what I said to you previously.

>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.

put in floppy.

"mount /dev/floppy /mnt/floppy"
"cd /mnt/floppy"
"ls"

Oddly enough that isn't that different then what I was using in the 
90's. Became simpler, as a matter of fact, since I'm not worrying as 
much about filesystem support or specifying filesystems.

Can't do it anymore because none of my systems have floppies anymore.

> 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. 

Well, since you're hurling insults at me, let's reread my first response 
to you.

"use the mount command, do what is needed from /mnt/floppy, then unmount 
it. Otherwise you're probably dealing with a Nautilus problem or 
automounting problem..."

Mount command. Another one to follow that up if you're going to insult 
me rather than ask what I'm talking about, "man mount".

Nautilus? Not around in "93 or 94". Nor the automatic filesystem 
mounting system. Both new.

>As far as I can tell, my
> asking Ubuntu to manage floppies is like asking Einstein to manage a
> ball-peen hammer.

More like asking him to use a cell phone to text his faves, since the 
automatic mounting system/Nautilus weren't around then.

> 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.

Two things...you can stop acting like a jerk and be civil and look at 
how it was actually done "back when" rather than spout insults and 
flamebait about how linux is so backwards for not mastering creaky tech 
when it DOES just fine, considering that the floppy drive doesn't even 
tell the system when media is inserted or removed or altered, and you 
can look at the command mount and move your bitching to having to use a 
command line to work around a bug in Nautilus.