[Gllug] linux and floppy disks

[Ian Norton]

On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 10:26:09PM +0100, Chris Ball wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 05:14:07PM -0400, Ian Norton wrote:
> > I was working on an idea for linux boxen in schools, one stumbling block i
> > could see is the mounting and unmounting of floppies. is there any way to not
> > need to do this? maybe mounting the floppy with 0 caching? i dunno.
> 
> Hum. Well, obviously nothing knows when a new floppy hits the drive.
> 
> Personally, I'd be tempted to write up a little gtk app involving a big
> picture of a disk on the desktop; with some mount/umount code, and maybe
> a gmc called on the mount directory - in that way, it's analogised to
> double-clicking a 'Shortcut to A:' icon, so it's understandable, or at
> least Not As Bad. Sort of. Using zero caching wouldn't help you much,
> and would make the eventual access Really Slow.  
> 
> Another (bad!) idea would be Sick Things with things like a proxy 
> /dev/fd0 and kernel hooks and attempted reads every five seconds or
> so. But I don't do Sick Things. Often. :-)
> 
> Hrm. Anyway. Some ideas of varying simplicity and usefulness..
> 

hmm intresting, the big gtk button hmm :-) hehe

maybe doing away with floppies all together.. do internal iomega zips read
floppies too? and do they detect media changes? (i imagine they do)

bred. ls120 drives may be an option but this idea was to suit bog standard
hardware.

0 caching would do what i want though wouldnt it? i mean speed is not much of
an issue really with it, 

bred




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