Generic usb diskett drive just works.

[woodsmoke]

I purchased mine at a computer shoppe and it really IS generic in that even the labeling on the bottom says:

"All brand names and trademarks are registered property of their respective owners" and that is the TOTALITY of any information.

There is not even a manufacturer's name.

But it is this drive by Proster.

Long time users will well remember how much hand wringing was involved in getting "Linux" to interact with a diskett in the transition to more powerful machines and different cabling a few years ago.

The usb cable has changed all that.

It is not "shown" in the Dolphin until one inserts a floppy and then it is shown with a few different icons but always as "0 bytes" even though it is working.

I plugged it in and waited a minute. Nothing happened.

I inserted a diskette and it popped the notifier and the Mavica images, the associated files and other things like documents just appeared .. just works.

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

This afternoon my wife wanted me to copy 22 pages of her genealogy research to send to some of her relatives. I hauled the old HP 1600 series PSC inkJet (which had long ago dried up) and plugged it into a USB port. When I hit the ON button a dialog popped up after a couple seconds and stating that the printer had been recognized and configured. I used XSane to scan the pages and saved them as jpg's in a new folder. I then ran Gwenview on that folder and cycled through the images, hitting Ctl+P followed by the Enter key on each one. Then I turned off the printer and unplugged it, sacked it back up and stuffed it back onto the top shelf in a closet.

Oh, later I realized that I didn't have the master document in my FamilyHistory folder. I had restored from an earlier copy made before I created that 273 page family history. I pulled out my $20 CD/DVD USB CDROM and plugged it in. I began surfing some suspect DVDs and found what I was looking for. I posted a printout of one page of one chapter in a previous message.

I just love it when things work "out of the box".

[woodsmoke]

lol yep

woodsimilarsmoke

[jglen490]

I have a couple of USB floppy drives. Mine are not quite totally behaving in the same way. I can plug each in, and when I put a floppy in a drive I can see the files. But when a floppy is not in a drive, the drive will constantly be in seek mode. No errors pop up, but it can't be good for the drive. Other than that they each work correctly.

[GreyGeek]

My USB floppie drive is a Lacie. It worked perfectly the last time I used it to get ancient archival material from my 3.5" floppies. That was about 5 or 6 years ago. I just looked for it in my desk but couldn't find it. I have no idea where it is. Must have grown legs and walked off.

[jglen490]

They do that!!

It's probably not a big deal as I don't use it much. I've pretty much copied all my old floppies to my desktop drive.

When I need the drive, though, it sure is handy to have one available.

[GreyGeek]

Handy, but in an extremely limited way. What can one store on a 1.4 or 3.5 Mb floppy these days?

[jglen490]

Not much, but every now and then I find a "long lost" floppy that might have something interesting on it. So having the drive is handy then to check it out and save to my desktop hard drive. Doesn't happen much anymore. though.

[woodsmoke]

jgloen,

as with me, it so happens that the oddment of a maple in the fall over a cemetary provides a wonderful example of "habit" in terms of a tree.

and for internet useage the file size is fine.

woodsmoke