Re: Floppy disk access in Gnome.

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sun, 2001-10-28 at 00:58, Rob Brown-Bayliss wrote:
> > For the love of the gods, no!  It *is* a kernel issue!  Even if you
> 
> Yeah Yeah, not every one is in the same time zone you know!!!

... And?

> 
> > > Just as I had a problem when I switched to windows with it's not knowing
> > > if there was a floppy in the drive (The amiga knew, great that was)
> > > 
> > 
> > Hmm, I'm curious as to what you mean; how does Windows not knowing there
> > is a floppy work?  Doesn't it always check every time you access it?
> 
> Windows handles floppys poorly as well.  If I save a word doc to a
> floppy, eject the floppy with out exiting word then the file on t he
> floppy is corupt.  Even though the disk spun and the lights were on etc,
> no body is home.  Try it, it sucks as much as the need to mount.
> unmount.

Yes, that I've made a point about.  Try removing a disk (or CD) right at
the wrong moment, you will get a BSOD that cannot be escaped (insert
disk XYZ... do so, it just keeps asking for it).

> 
> Now, the amiga diod not use generic floppy drives such as those found in
> PC's.  The amiga floppy drive has extra hardware tat notifys the system
> when there is a disk inserted.  Put a disk in and it's mounted.  Make a
> change to the floppy and it's writen right then and there, not buffered
> so that if the disk is removed all is ok.

Better hardware, most likely.  Macs, when they used to have floppy
drives, were the same.

> 
> This is how it should be on any system (including windows and unix) as
> floppys can be removed at the push of a button.

If you want 100% guaranteed effectiveness, both floppy drives and CD
drives need some improvements.  CD's cannot tell the OS when the user
has requested an eject.  Floppies don't notify on insert, remove, don't
handle locking, or anything.

If you can get hardware vendors to supply hardware that does this (and
would, likewise, make the hardware more expensive) than you would save
everyone who could afford it a lot of pain.  Personally, I would love it
if the hardware was more intelligent.

> 
> So relax, it's a kernel issue as you say, but it's a user issue to which
> makes it a gnome and kde issue as well.  How are the kde people
> handeling it does any one know?

I really don't see how you think it's a GNOME issue.  On your reasoning
there, it's also a Bash issue.  I use the command line a lot, since
GUI's are a lot less effective for certain tasks, and I don't see why
Bash shouldn't have the same moutning abilities as my GUI does.  Oh,
wait, if the kernel handled it, it would!

KDE has their heads on their shoulders and is relegating it to the
underlying OS, as well.  They know what they are doing.  Hopefully, so
do the GNOME people, and they will likewise understand that hardware
control/access belongs to the kernel.

> 
> -- 
> 
>   Rob Brown-Bayliss
>  ---======o======---
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Sean Etc.