Re: Win98 -- all kidding aside

On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 13:23 -0400, Rashkae wrote:
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.

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.


Every linux version I've ever tried handles floppies just fine. Before
the days of automount, you were expected to use the mount command (or
some mount widget on your desktop GUI if you were a gui person.) This
was different than Windows, but no less functional

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.


And as far as I can tell, from reading previous threads, the only
problem you have with Hardy is that the floppy device gets renamed to
the disk label of the first disk you use. An interesting bug to be
sure, but nothing that stops you from using your floppy drive.

The GUI tells me that disk utilites are installed, but won't let me
access those utilities or use them to format floppy disks.


I don't know why I'm even replying to you.. from the very first message
you had about floppies you've only ever been able to express your
questions and concerns in flames and insults. (Hint: I've never had
this kind of trouble in Windows is not the right way to start a question
on a support list. The answer then is automatically 'then use Windows.')


No. The message is "use another system." The Mac, for example, handles
floppies with ease. But your response probably indicates why Linux does
not.

On behalf of the developers and volunteers who labour to make Linux and
Ubuntu as great as it is, I apologize that your experience was
frustrating and thank you for bringing a new problem to people's
attention. That being said, I will no longer bother answering or
reading this crap you throw around.

There it is. That's the Linux help system I remember of old.


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