Floppy disk access in Gnome.

[George Farris <george gmsys com>]

If Linux wants to be accepted by main stream users such as students at
local colleges, it MUST change the way the floppy disk and to a lesser
extent cdrom is handled.  I've had many opportunities to use Linux in a
situation at our local University-College and have had to turn it down
and submit to Microsoft because of issues with Linux's handling of the
floppy disk.

Yes, it's sad but true.  I've tried to educate the instructors and a few
have even tried with their classes but every time it comes back to the
brain dead way in which Linux handles the removable media like the
floppy.

Let me tell you that nobody and I MEAN NOBODY wants to mount and unmount
the floppy disk.  Students store their work on floppy and transport it
back and forth between home and the campus and they don't want to mount
and unmount floppies.  Now many of you might say "but it's so simple". 
STOP, they don't want to hear it.  It's just one more change from the
"norm" as they see it, sure they can use openoffice and gnumeric because
they are fairly familiar with these applications but ask them to mount a
floppy, forget it.  If you couldn't get the diskette out without
un-mounting it maybe, but not the way the drives are designed and built
right now.

We need to fix this, supermount looked like it might be the way to go
but I haven't seen it be reliable under heavy use.  What can we do?

-- 
George Farris - VE7FRG
George gmsys com