Re: Floppy disk access in Gnome - followup.

[George Farris <george gmsys com>]

Whoo boy and floppy disk access in GNOME.

First off allow me to apologize for my venting the other day.I had just
lost a perfect opportunity to install four linux remote terminals in the
Library here at the college and lost it due to the floppy disk issue.I
was mad, I vented and well... you all know the rest.

Now having said that I would like to respond to a number of things that
came up in reply to my post.

(1)
There was a comment that this is a linux kernel issue and that GNOME
installs on more that just Linux. 

Yes you are of course correct, however, I was referring to Linux and
GNOME and the issue of floppy disk access is not one of just the
kernel.  Floppy disks are used by people, and generally through a UI of
some type.  In our case it will be GNOME.  The OS and the desktop have
to work together in order for this to happen.

For example: autofs and Nautilus don't always get along:-)

(2)
The next comment was that "You don't have to mount floppies - just use
tar with the raw device (/dev/rfloppy or whatever)."

Let us review the state of the desktop: In 90% of cases it is a Windows
OS.  People are used to accessing removable devices in a certain way. 
Now this may not be the "right" way according to UNIX thinking but it
has the majority.  We need to be able to support this.  If we feel the
need we can suggest when people use the floppy that there is a another
way to do things but to remove their choice is not good.

(3)
The next suggestion was to use mdir, mcopy etc.  Fine.  Can you imagine
asking a student to save their word processing file to the hard drive,
drop down to the command line and then use mcopy to copy the file to
their floppy.  They would rebel in microseconds.  In short they just
won't do it and don't want to hear about it.

(4)
Mounting a floppy for general use in a computer lab is bad news,
period!  Because we can pop the the diskette out without unmounting,this
will never work.  Students forget their floppies in the drives all the
time.  Someone comes along and pops out an already mounted floppy and
boom, problem.

There must be an easy and I emphasize EASY way to to handle this
situation, so,I put it to the list how can we accomplish these goals:

In any GNOME application.
1) Run application, create a document, graphic, whatever.
2) Insert diskette (no mounting, people won't do it).
3) Save directly to the floppy.
4) Pull diskette out and leave (no unmounting, people will forget to
unmount).