Mount floppy permanently
 

Hi, Newbie to Linux here

(RH9) latest updates installed on machine

Loving getting to grips with something more challenging (in some respects) than windows

I want to know if its possible to have the floppy drive mount up when booting? Its just a finish question. I know its a windows thing but I like to have the ability to put a disk in the 'a' drive and then read the contents without telling the machine to find the device first.

I wont mind being told this is a daft thing to do, if I am told why.

Also, how do you get the icon for the said device placed on the desktop?

Hope this doesn't cause too many split sides (due to laughing) we all have to start somewhere.

This mind is open to the world of Linux - so far so good and enjoying the exploration.

:newbie:

:D

There's no way to do what you want to do with a floppy. When you mount a floppy, you mount the disk in the drive, not the drive itself, so you need to remount if you change the floppy. This means that it would only mount the disk that was in the drive on startup, and that it would complain if there was no disk.

Also, getting the icon on there depends on which desktop. If you mean KDE, have a look at right-click->configure desktop->behavior, and look for devices. I'm not sure about any other desktops.

well, i wouldn't say daft, but because of the removable nature of floppies, mounting on boot would'nt be entirely smart as it could interfere with proper startup if there is no disk in the drive on boot

Actually you mount the file system that is on the disk!!
Same with mounting a hard drive, be it vfat, ext2 or 3, reiserfs, or umsdos..........

I don't know about rh but I have Mandrake 9.1 and in the control center there are options )under Mount points) to automatically mount your floppy and cdrom. Its pretty nice I think it just mounts the disk whenever you double click on the shortcut also you can just stick another floppy in there and open it back up and you mounted another floppy.
I think , and I have heard that mandrake is geared more toward beginners also, I have used both KDE and Gnome and my experience has been that KDE gives a more user friendly windows type experience

lang, what about unmounting it before putting in another floppy? how does one do that?

Yeah, it's called supermount, but it doesn't seem too stable. Whenever I enabled it, it would allow me to get a file listing, but whenever I tried to open a file it would be blank, and after that it, it would report the file as non-existant. Very strange. Besides, mounting is not hard. mount/umount or just kwikdisk.

Supermount works fine for me.
Here's a part of my fstab:

none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

I really can't tell what options are mandatory for your box. But try putting merely something like

none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,umask=0 0 0

In your fstab, and see if it works.
Or use the mount command:

# mount -t supermount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

mymojo

Sorry, I dont know the details but Im pretty sure supermount unmounts it automatically and then mounts again when you refresh your file listing.