USB floppy drive problems (Closed)

Hardware Compatibility
1

As my newly built system no longer has a floppy drive I bought a USB floppy drive.

I am using mint 13 Maya 64bit and Floppy Drive is shown in the list of drives when I click on the “computer” icon.

However, I am unable to view any of the contents of floppy disks as when I click on the floppy disk icon it says no program to open floppy drive.

Is there a program that I need to install.

Thanks in advance.

2

Hi Tramlink I have a USB floppy drive and I just tried it and it works ok but only with some dosks I’m running Peppermint 4.

do you have a selection of disks you can try, alternatively you could try installing fdutils from synaptic,

I checked on my system and i don’t have fdutils installed and it’s working for me but it might be worth a shot

Good luck

Graeme

3

I seem to vaguely remember there being a long running issue/bug with floppy drive access prior to udisks2

What is Mint 13 using … what’s the output from:

dpkg -l | grep udisk

[EDIT]

You could see the responses here to MANUALLY mount the floppy:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/14733/how-can-i-get-a-usb-floppy-drive-to-work

Where you identify the drives “device” with:

sudo df
udisks --enumerate
udisks --show-info /dev/sd(X)

where (X) is the device assignment.

Then mount the drive with:

udisks --mount /dev/sd(X) --mount-fstype=vfat

again where (X) is the device assignment.

not ideal, but as I said, I think there was a bug in udisks back then.

4

Hi Out put-

userone@office2 ~ $ dpkg -l | grep udisk
ii udisks 1.0.4-5ubuntu2.1 storage media interface
userone@office2 ~ $

Is it not possible to update udisk?

Hope you had an enjoyable Christmas day.

5

Hi Tramlink

As I said in an earlier post I have a USB floppy drive and it works fine for me running Peppermint 4

my output to the same command you ran is as follows

graeme@Linux1 ~ $ dpkg -l | grep udisk
ii  libudisks2-0:i386                             2.1.0-2                                  i386         GObject based library to access udisks2
ii  udisks                                        1.0.4-7build1                            i386         storage media interface
ii  udisks2                                       2.1.0-2                                  i386         D-BUS service to access and manipulate storage devices
graeme@Linux1 ~ $

So looking at the difference it looks like you’re missing udisks2 which is available in Synaptic, but I can’t say if it’s available in your repo or if it’s as simple as just installing it, It might be interesting to see if it is available in your repo but it’s not really something I know much about

Good luck

Graeme

6

Thanks for your reply there is no update in Synaptic and there are no updates for Ubuntu on the udisks website as they need to be compiled and I’m not up to that.

So is it possible to update udisks or should I wait for the upgrade tpo the next LTS version of mint?

7

Not that I could find previously :frowning:

You really need to either manually mount them … or switch to a more recent version of Ubuntu/Mint/Peppermint/etc.

8

Thanks, I shall have to wait for the next LTS version of mint.

9

Hmm. This seems to be reoccurring problem. People want the LTS versions but then also need up-to-date packages.
Would it not be better to go with one of the semi-rolling distros like Linux Mint Debian?
It is based on Debian testing, so packages are always up to date (stabilised by Mint).
You get updates in Update packs on a regular basis so you would not need to reinstall it - ever.

10

I’d tend to agree, a rolling release distro has it’s appeal … problem seems to be nobody does one with as much polish as Ubuntu.

I must take another look at Debian and LMDE though … it’s been a while.

11
Cons:

LMDE requires a deeper knowledge and experience with Linux, dpkg and APT.
Debian is a less user-friendly/desktop-ready base than Ubuntu. Expect some rough edges.
No EFI, GPT or secureBoot support.

This is an issue people who are looking for LTS versions tend to be operators not engineers so they want the most user friendly version possible.

12
This is an issue people who are looking for LTS versions tend to be operators not engineers so they want the most user friendly version possible.

That is a misconception. You need to nurchure the LTS more, specially when you want newer packages.
Contrary what it states, LMDE IS rock solid and very rarely needs user intervention during the updates.

13

I’m 99.9% sure that LMDE warning was originally penned when LMDE was first released and still quite experimental, so was intentionally off-putting to new users… Seems they’ve just never changed/removed it.

LMDE should (like Debian) be rock solid once set up … the problems are only going to arise when say adding software/drivers/etc. that aren’t in the default repos.

When they say “rough edges” they don’t mean “user experience” or “how well it runs” or “updates” … more that if you have a problem finding a “fix” online is likely to be a little harder, and Ubuntu “fixes” may not apply.