How do I save a file to floppy?
My first post:
It seems to me that the biggest problem facing the open source community is attracting enough new people so that all this work doesn't become just a minor footnote in the history of how Bill Gates took over the world. I have installed Fedora Core 1, and am trying to establish BASIC FUNCTIONALITY! I am a reasonably intelligent man, but for the life of me, I can't seem to figure out how to save one stupid test file to a simple floppy disk. I can write in OpenOffice1.1, but I can't figure out how to save the stupid thing to a disk. Yes, yes, I know "File, Save, and File, Save As" but I get stuck at the very next window. As I previously mentioned, the biggest problem with open source is attracting new users. I thought a simple thing like saving to a floppy would be easy to learn from Help, from postings, from google, from reading anything I could find in the library or online, from asking anyone who has ever heard of Linux, but no. I am utterly stumped. This is not the way to attract new people. Can anyone help me in English, with small, simple words like "Click on" and "then"? As much as I want to help all my friends and neighbors escape from Micro$oft, I can't in good faith recomment an operating system with 14 GUI's, 7 text editors, 4 browsers, and 3 shells. Talk about confusing! Call me Bob:mad: :mad: |
just check that u have u floppy mounted in the system... by mounting i mean right clik on the desktop and mount devices in that floppy... and then try saving the file to the floppy disk it should work...
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Oh! WOW!!! It just worked!!! It wouldn't open before because the test document was already open on one of the other four desktops. You, hiteshmaisheri, are a miracle worker! I CAN SAVE THE WORLD NOW! I am whole! I am once again, a MAN! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! Call me Bob:D :D |
Whilst I am way ahead of robert52 in that I can get the filemanager-type window on my Gnome desktop showing the contents of the floppy and even, with some luck, copy a file from the floppy to $HOME, I have had next to no luck in copying a file from $HOME to the floppy. It goes through the motions - the drive light flashes for a fraction of a second, the file's icon is copied into the 'floppy' window, but an hour later I am still unable to 'unmount the volume' because the 'device is busy'. And when I insert the floppy in a 'doze machine, surprise, surprise the file isn't on there. Any ideas on how to speed things up?
ps. I'm having problems writing to CDs too, but only non-empty ones, blank ones work fine. However having to use a new disc for each file, no matter how small, gets a bit expensive after a while. And as for my 128MB USB drive, forget it! Unlike the floppy and CD, I haven't even been able to mount that yet. TIA for any help . |
Okay, Unix-based operating systems use a single filing system for the entire computer, so there's not C:, A:, etc. All there is, is a filing system / with directories /directory1, /directory1/subdirectory1, etc.
Floppy disks are usually "attached" or mounted, onto the filing system at /mnt/floppy. Before you can copy a file to the floppy disk, it needs to be attached to the file system. Usually by right-clicking the Floppy icon on the desktop you can choose Mount from the menu. If not, open up a Terminal and type mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy Then all you do is save your file to /mnt/floppy/ or use your favorite file manager (usually Nautilus or Konquerer) to copy files to that location. I think that unmounting disk drives when they're not in use frees up memory, that's why the floppy drive isn't mounted automatically when you start the computer. Have fun! |
Thank you all for your simple, clear direct comments. This helped me immeasureably. No! It helped me measurably. Dang! Now I'm confused again.
Call me Bob |
What is confusing you now, Bob? ;)
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Great. Everything worked correctly as per instructions. I appreciate the assistance.
I have one question: After you have saved the file, etc. to a floppy is it necessary to unmount the floppy drive? |
yes, unless you want to continue using that same floppy.
You can remove the disk while it's mounted, but the system will think it's still there. If you try to read a different floppy at this point, or try to reopen the files on the original disk without re-inserting it, you'll get errors (file not found or something similar). |
well when I right clicked on my document in openoffice all I got was a choice of fonts and alignment and line spacing. I have suse 9.1 pro installed and I can't figure out how to do something simple like save my document to the floppy? Talk about crap. I shelled out 90 bucks for this!? How hard is for a programer to in a simple floppy option under "save as".
I don't want to hear this mount and unmount crap. I want to 1. click SAVE 2. be given the option FLOPPY 3. click floppy 4. have the friggen computer write openoffice document to the floppy drive. If it aint that simple then why even bother including the wordprocessing software. Hell even windows 3.1 could do this easier. Will some programmer please fix this discrepency and send it to open office...please!!!!!!!! |
It is not OpenOffice's problem.
It really is very simple to mount a floppy, simply type "mount /mnt/floppy" at the command line, and "umount /mnt/floppy" when you are done. Just because Linux does things differently from Windows, it is not necessarily crap. You simply have to tell the OS that a floppy is in the drive, and then OpenOffice will be able to save to the floppy with no problem. Just make sure that you unmount the floppy after use, or you will lose the file. I hope this helps --Ian |
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