I use open office 1.1

I can create and save/resave documents to my hard drive. For files that are presently on the floppy I can edit and resave them. But, with regards to the floppy disc I cannot create a new file and try to save it; nor can I rename a file thru Save As. I get the error:

Error saving the Document New.sxw: /floppy/New.sxw does not exist

Sounds like a permissions problem, not openoffice itself.

OK: I've never tried this myself ...

My system uses Ubuntu Dapper and OOo 2.0. The floppy is block-special-device: /dev/fd0 which is mounted to /media/floppy0 (/floppy is an unusual mountpoint - you should check this) ... I can read the files in the floppy but "save as" generates the error you report.

I note that the "save" option is greyed out - so I suspect a permissions issue.
ls -la /media shows that root is the owner and only root can write to the floppy.

So I would check your permissions if I were you.

Usually I would mount a floppy in cli using $ mount /media/floppy ... however, mount couldn't autodetect the file system type so I was forced to use sudo mount -t vfat /media/floppy which worked fine... only it set the owner of the floppy to "root" instead of my user.

I edited /etc/fstab so the fs in the fd0 line read "vfat" instead of "auto", and remounted the floppy as a normal user. This time, save-as worked fine.

Possibly you mounted the floppy from commandline as root?

CHeck the permissions on the files on the floppy, when they were copied they may have had the wrong permissions set.

I would also follow Simons advice on the mount point for the floppy.

You also might want to consider updating to OO2.02 it loads much faster.

Gentlemen, your prompting to check the permissions led me to the solution. The permissions were fine; and then I saw that I had already used 1.1M space. I copied the large files to the hard drive, and now "Save As" works like a charm.
I thank you both