is the floppy enabled in the BIOS?

On one of the machines it is definitely set to auto and not disabled.
I am pretty sure it is enabled on the other machines that I see the same issue on, though double checking the bios from them right now isn't convenient.
This has been happening for a long time (I noticed last summer), but I haven't gotten around to filing a bug for it until now. I did join the bug for nautilus not seeing them a while back, but that one hasn't gotten any attention and I suspect the problem isn't really at nautilus' level.

I also had to add modprobe floppy to my /etc/rc.d/rc.local to get the floppy driver autoloaded, it seems autoloading got disabled for some reason. (Maybe somebody did it to reduce bootup times? Maybe it's just a bug.)

hmm, once upon a time, udev provided /etc/modprobe.d/floppy-pnp.conf:
alias pnp:dPNP0700 floppy
alias acpi:PNP0700: floppy

but then bug #514329 was filed, and I removed it.

Although:

$ modinfo floppy|grep alias
alias:          block-major-2-*

I don't see the module aliases...

they should be in /etc/modprobe.d/dist.conf or provided by the kernel module

Hi,

I had to create /etc/modprobe.d/floppy-pnp.conf as mentioned above before I could get /dev/fd0 and a Floppy Drive icon although the resulting icon is unusable - see bug 533543
Kernel 2.6.32.9-70.fc12.i686.PAE

There seem to be a lot of things combining to make floppies difficult to use.

John.

Now that Fedora 13 has been officially released, the not-creating /dev/fd0 problem is still there. Either issuing "# modprobe floppy" or adding "modprobe floppy" to /etc/rc.d/rc.local seem to work, however.

I have a very difficult issue with believing that Fedora cannot easily support floppys given that many machine still in use have them and that my hps still demand that any boot issues be stored/saved on floppys.

Though I respect the prior comments of "ways to works around", I think Fedora needs to treat floppys as "first-class citizens" of the IO world so long as external vendors still expect them to be available. I am prepared to believe that in a couple of years, this will not be the case, but my experience is that my machines still expect them and "life-of-product" has not been reached

Thanks,
Paul

This bug was assigned to the wrong user name (I have two) and is now fixed. We had agreed at some point to no longer load the floppy driver automatically (I had objected to this, but I was persuaded that at this stage perhaps more people have non-existent floppy drives that aren't attached to *real* controllers - so probing for them adds all kinds of latencies to various operations). I think I must sadly say that you can easily load the driver if you want it. If you feel this is unfair, we could make it even more obvious how to do this in docs.

I was just testing this on F13 (I'd been on F12 until last week) and noticed that the "default" resolution is that "it ain't there and no idea how to get it".

I feel this is unfair for older machines that still have floppies, even if one can argue that "there are better ways".

Can I "suggest" that a new bug get spun off this to provide a "yum install floppy" (for example) so that if I want my floppy to be seen and to work, it is a simple matter of a yum install.

Thanks,
Paul

IMHO it's just plain unacceptable to skip the probing for hardware which is definitely out there and exists. I really don't see why I have to modprobe floppy in my rc.local, and the average user will never figure this out, they'll just have their floppy drive not working.

Oh, and documentation doesn't help. Users don't read documentation. They expect their hardware to just work. If it doesn't, they'll say that "Linux (sic) is broken" and go back to the proprietary operating system they were using before.

If the folks responsible for this issue had posted "here's the documentation you need" as a link, I would have looked at it.

As far I can tell, there is no evidence of documentation in this bug trail so whether users look at it is moot until a link is provided. I have no intention of drilling through all of Fedora's docs without 1) knowing it has been written and it in and 2) a link to where it is

Paul

If one of the ideals of Open Source is to make computing freely available to a wide range of individuals across the world, it stands to reason that people will want it to work with old/refurbished/recycled/donated machines. In many cases, I would imagine, floppies are available where USB memory sticks and CD writers are not an option. 
How frustrating it is to have a floppy drive that can't be used. 
If the policy now is that floppy drives are not important enough to be supported at installation then an easy way should be found to make them work subsequently.
I agree with comment number 10, above - How about a package, included in the software on installation disks (and advertised as such) which will simply get the floppy drive working for those that need it?
John.

(In reply to comment #14)
> How about a package, included in the software on installation disks (and > advertised as such) which will simply get the floppy drive working for those that > need it?
I wholeheartedly agree. There are old computers in use and, they may depend on floppies to varying degrees. Why, I might sometimes need to check something on my old floppies myself...

At one point Kyle thought he had a good idea for a solution for this that made things work for people with floppy drives and people with misconfigured or broken controllers. I don't believe he finished implementing it, but it might have been just priorities not something that was undoable.

I agree that this is fixable, I will ping Kyle and discuss.

And what did Kyle have to say???

Well, it is still in happening in F14 which I just installed yesterday/today.

Today is almost 6 months from comment #17.

I don't have the necessary access to update the version from F13 to F14, so hopefully someone else will

To repeat James in comment #18, "And what did Kyle have to say???", and is this fixable as Jon states in comment #17

Thanks,
Paul

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