[Wolves] Floppy discs

[Old Dan]

Chris Owen wrote:

> Forgive my ignorance  - but is this simply to allow the saving of a word
> processor document to floppy disk?  If so, then god help non-technical
> users like me!
> 
Don't worry - what we're talking about here is something to essentially 
hide the mounting and unmounting of removable media like floppies and 
CD-ROMs.  You can usually do it by inserting a floppy or whatever into 
the drive and clicking on the floppy or CD icon on the desktop, saving 
the file and then right-clicking on the icon and selecting 'unmount' 
before removing the cd or floppy.

There is a reason for all this, however, and that is that Linux, like 
Unix, has a decent file system, within which you may pretty much 
seamlessly place as (near enough) as many media as you wish - there is 
no restriction on where filesystems go.  This is extremely useful as it 
makes storage management a doddle - for instance, if you run out of 
space on a drive, you can simply move, say, /home to another drive and 
alter the filesystem table (/etc/fstab) to reflect the change.  Presto!

It also doesn't really matter where the filesystem is - you can use 
something called NFS (Network File System) which means you can use (as 
in possibly actually boot from) a filesystem across the network seamlessly.

Unfortunately the side effect of all this wonderous functionality is 
that it makes it a pain in the ar5e when all you've got is a standalone 
workstation and you just want to save a file to a fscking floppy disk. 
You have to go through all that rigmoroll I mentioned in the first 
paragraph.  Unless, of course, you have supermount.  (BTW Mandrake comes 
with supermount by default, though I'm not sure of any of the others)

-- 
Dan