floppy

[dibl]

Re: floppy

Mike, your thought for the day, and I say this with love:

thumbdrive

[MoonRise]

Re: floppy

I really agree. I initially played around with 3.5 floppy on Kubuntu, just because. What I use now is the thumbdrive or Memory Stick, what ever you want to call it. Simply the best option. They really have come down in price for a decent size capacity.

[Detonate]

Re: floppy

Well, my computer doesn't have a floppy drive, but I have a couple of old computers lying around and I am going to cannibalize one of them and install a floppy tomorrow just to see what happens. Might need it some day. I'll post back my experience with this.

[Detonate]

Re: floppy

I got the 1.44 mb floppy drive installed. But it does not show up automatically, and does not read a disk when inserted. You can mount the disk using the normal mount command without problems, and I created a desktop icon as did one of the previous posters. I'll probably never use this thing again. I bought a thumb drive (1GB) at Wally World the other day for $20. It takes this floppy drive about three full minutes to mount about 800 kb.

[Detonate]

Re: floppy

I just discovered something new. If you install mtools

sudo apt-get install mtools

then when you open Konqueror you can type "floppy:/" in the location bar and it will open the floppy disk in the drive. Much faster than mounting the disk.

There is also a frontend GUI program for mtools called MToolsFM that works well.

[dibl]

Re: floppy

I just discovered something new. If you install mtools

Good find, detonate!

However, like you I find myself kinda scratching my head -- the floppy drive that I put in my new system which I built only 6 months ago had never had a diskette in it until I did the same experiment you did (last week) and found that if you go through the mount process it will eventually show up as available to use in Kubuntu. I don't know what I was thinking at the time I bought it -- I guess since it only cost $10 USD, and the motherboard had a floppy connector on it, I though "why not?". It hasn't been that long since the 1.44MB diskette was an invaluable component of a high-end PC, but now it reminds me of the old farmers' definition of "useless", which I will paraphrase for politeness:

"mammary glands on the male horse"



EDIT: Oh yeah, now I remember! My whizzy new Intel D975XBX motherboard showed up with (surprise!) two 1.44MB diskettes, which hold the SATA RAID drivers. Which I think is caused by the fact that Mickeysoft's last generation of Windows (XP) still makes you press F6 during installation if you want to set up a RAID array, and insert diskettes ....

[Detonate]

Re: floppy

As I said, I had a couple of floppy drives from some old computers that I cannibalized for parts, so it was a fun exercise. I recently emptied a file cabinet drawer that was completely full of 3.5 disks and threw most of them away, but I kept a few that might have a few old files I want on them. That''ll be fun, going through those. I have several old Zip 100 disks that I know have some pictures on them I want, And I still have the old Zip drive around. Maybe that will be my next project.

[MoonRise]

Re: floppy

As far as ZIP drives, I have a good post with some links about that (http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=13058.0). That is a great find for the floppy though, I never lucked up on that during my ZIP set up. Cool!!

[Detonate]

Re: floppy

My Zip is a Iomega Parallel Port 100mb. I think this is going to be a challenge

Right now I am working on a XP machine without the original disks and trying to recover it for the owner. I'll be having a lot of fun the next few hours..

[dibl]

Re: floppy

Right now I am working on a XP machine without the original disks and trying to recover it for the owner.

Yuck! Good luck with that. Worst case, take out his hard drive and make it a slave on your computer, copy his data and burn it on a DVD(s), then yell "Thank God we didn't lose any of your data!". Then you can give him the bad news about the new OS he needs ....

[Detonate]

Re: floppy

That is exactly what I am doing. Except he has a brand new 3.8 GB HD he wants installed, so I am killing two birds with one stone. I can't even get into the windows install, so Kubuntu is going on the new drive, and then I'll copy his files from the old drive.

[penguin.ch]

Re: floppy

My Zip is a Iomega Parallel Port 100mb. I think this is going to be a challenge

At least on my "06.10", this took me less than five minutes The (potential) stumbling block: the kernel modules for the parallel port, which you might have to load manually (and which, in extreme cases, might even be "blacklisted").