What current distributions support floppy drives, real ones not USB, without major headaches? Something with a live DVD available would be nice but not essential. I don't need anything bleeding edge so an slightly older release would be OK.

A floppy drive is just another drive and will be 'discovered' like any other scsii/usb/ide drive, but there are litrerly thousounds of distros out there with 'live' disks available juust down load a few isos and give it whirl, maybe try debian first, if on the othet hand what you mean is you need a distro that fits on a floppy you are going to really struggle.

No, I don't want a distro that fits on a floppy, I already have one, Dos 6.22

Ububtu 14.04LTS does not recognize the floppy PERIOD

I am tired of downloading stuff that doesn't work so a specific suggestion would be nice. All I want is for it to work with a floppy "out of the box".

I have heard that many distro's have removed support for it. I'd have thought 14 still had it.

I doubt that disk qualifies as extra large but might load fdutils just because.

Might look at this to see if it will still fix it.

https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...r-floppy-drive

Also be sure that your user has permissions for these tasks.

What tests have you performed to suggest that ubuntu doesn't provide floppy support?

if you run 'dmesg | tail' I'm a terminal emulator window do you see anything mentioning "512-byte logical blocks :[1.47 MB/1.40 MiB]" (assuming 3.5" floppy)?

if so, shortly after that it should show the device name ( perhaps [sd0], or [fd0] ). assuming fd0, does manually mounting /dev/fd0 (with a floppy disk in the drive, of course) work?

Puppy still supplies a icon for mounting and writing floppies.
You can do a frugal install to like a 2 gig partition and chainload the Puppy through the new grub text it generates in /tmp after the install. Just add the entry to grub2 in Ubuntu.

Pmount will be your friend on floppys in Puppy Slack0 5.9

You can run as a live cd in ram also. Eject the cd. Do your floppy stuff. Not savw on exit.
No install needed. Up to you. I keep a puppy cd just for what you started this thread about.
From version 3.01 on up to present day. Puppy was made to run in ram as a live session.
Without a install. A save file made on exit will save changes. if wishing that also.
Save files can be kept in ~/home in Ubuntu as ext2 file system of 512MB or so.

Tried all of this stuff: http://askubuntu.com/questions/16859...rive-in-ubuntu

I get this:
skippy@skippy-KT690-mITX:~$ dmesg | tail
[ 27.993165] init: plymouth-upstart-bridge main process ended, respawning
[ 37.756042] snd_hda_intel 0000:01:05.2: azx_get_response timeout, switching to polling mode: last cmd=0x00370100
[ 38.760041] snd_hda_intel 0000:01:05.2: No response from codec, disabling MSI: last cmd=0x00370100
[ 41.876043] snd_hda_intel 0000:01:05.2: azx_get_response timeout, switching to single_cmd mode: last cmd=0x001f0500
[ 52.202992] audit_printk_skb: 132 callbacks suppressed
[ 52.202999] audit: type=1400 audit(1436223794.182:62): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" profile="unconfined" name="/usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf" pid=1917 comm="apparmor_parser"
[ 52.203014] audit: type=1400 audit(1436223794.182:63): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" profile="unconfined" name="/usr/sbin/cupsd" pid=1917 comm="apparmor_parser"
[ 52.203670] audit: type=1400 audit(1436223794.182:64): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" profile="unconfined" name="/usr/sbin/cupsd" pid=1917 comm="apparmor_parser"
[ 5850.581212] systemd-hostnamed[2487]: Warning: nss-myhostname is not installed. Changing the local hostname might make it unresolveable. Please install nss-myhostname!
[ 9174.610555] systemd-hostnamed[2539]: Warning: nss-myhostname is not installed. Changing the local hostname might make it unresolveable. Please install nss-myhostname!
skippy@skippy-KT690-mITX:~$

I'll give this a try.

out of the box ( fresh install and no other software )

CentOS 5.11 would auto detect my 3.5 in 1.44 meg drive

CentOS 6.6 ( well i run SL 6.6 ) i have to run first
then i hear the tell tail ZZZ ZZZZ ZZZZ


for OS's using the CURRENT 2.6 kernel you need to run modprobe

for the 3 and 4 kernel ???
they might not even install on a 10+year old computer with a 3.5 in floppy drive
-- the ones that had a cd-rom READ ONLY drive
and had 256 to 512 meg ram
1 gig is about the minimum that so that the computer is still usable

I've got CentOS 6 on acomputer with a floppy drive. I can't see the drive listed in /dev but the module is available in /lib. Obviously, it doesn't bother to load the module even if a drive is present, but modprobe would do the trick. But if you just need it occasionally, then a live Puppy would be less trouble and much quicker to load.

I think the floppy disk code has been taken out of more recent kernels.
You would likely need a 2.4 or earlier kernel to use a floppy, which should show as /dev/fd0.
I think DSL still uses it, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Hmmm,

My mistake! Sorry, thought I'd read it somewhere, (though of no real interest to me personnally), but I'm sure DSL mounted floppies OK.

I use a floppy with PCLinuxOS.
udev ignores it, but I can still mount it manually.