[plug] Floppy access after Edgy>Feisty upgrade

[Patrick Coleman]

On 5/6/07, David Dartnall <darts at dialix.com.au> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> It appears that my floppy drive is not automatically mounted when a disk
> is inserted.
>
> Access via Places>Computer>Floppy drive    returns a momentary window
> with the message 'Opening floppy drive' and then opens the root
> directory in Nautilus. >media>floppy or floppy0 then displays the floppy
> files and floppy icon appears on the Desktop. Floppy mounted and now
> accessible.

Hmm, looks like my system does it too.

After a bit of searching, it appears to be a reported bug with Ubuntu.
See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/66869.
Priority is low and it was reported late 2006, so it may not get fixed
any time soon.

Changing your fstab entry from noauto to auto will only result in the
system trying to mount the floppy every time it boots - the
noauto/auto flags control what gets mounted when the command 'mount
-a' is run. As this command is run in the boot scripts, the
auto/noauto flags are typically used to control what gets mounted
automatically at boot time.

In short, all you can really do is work around it and wait for a fix
(or, of course, delve deep into the GNOME/nautilus subsystems to find
the culprit and be the savior of floppy-drive-using people everywhere
:).

However, you can write a quick shell script that emulates the correct behaviour:

#!/bin/bash
mount /media/floppy
nautilus /media/floppy

Copy the above three lines into a file on your Desktop called
openfloppy.sh (make sure the #! line is at the very start of the
file), then in a terminal run 'chmod +x ~/Desktop/openfloppy.sh'
(without quotes).

Once you've done that, you can open the file on your desktop, choose
'Run' and you'll get your floppy displayed. You can unmount the floppy
in the usual way (right-click on the floppy icon that appears and
choose 'Unmount Volume').

Hope that helps.

-Patrick


-- 
http://www.labyrinthdata.net.au