No floppy device in FC5

[nigel henry]

On Thursday 15 June 2006 16:23, Mike McCarty wrote:
> nigel henry wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to complain about this problem, I want
> > to
>
> Why not?
If this had been an MS OS that you'd paid for, then I suppose you should 
complain. Not that they would have listened. When you get something for free, 
I believe it's a bit different. Alright, you expect it to work, and FC5 does, 
although with the caveat that a lot of folks seem to be having Nvidea, and 
ATI graphics driver problems. Me too, with Rage128's r128 driver. But I'm 
using the vesa one, and apart from not being able to play DVD's, the graphics 
are ok.

I think my biggest complaint is that when you insert disk 1, you have no idea 
of changes that have been made since the earlier version of FC. A couple of 
pages here, showing major changes from the previous FC, and perhaps things to 
take note of during the install. This, before Anaconda starts, could save a 
lot of hassle, and annoyance, particularly for existing FC users. Putting 
aside the floppy problem, which I've fixed by creating a floppy directory 
in /media, and creating an /etc/fstab entry for the floppy, the biggest 
annoyance for me as a dial-up user is pirut. (pronounced pirate)

I had a lot of problems installing FC4, having to retry the install between 12 
and 15 times. Tried reducing the packages to be installed, doing a basic 
workstation install, and on and on. Perhaps this was why with FC5, and for 
the first time, I (bad move) did not customise the packages to be installed, 
only to find out post install, and after changing the r128 graphics driver to 
vesa, that pirut was, as of yet, incapable of accessing the CDROMS to add 
packages, without creating a local Yum repo, and I only discovered that after 
trawling through Fedoraforum. I would not want to put a new user to Linux 
through the hassle of creating a local Yum repo, taking up 3GB of harddrive 
space, and due to updates to the packages will probably only be of any use 
for about 3 months.

I suppose at discovering the "pirut" problem, and only having to had to change 
the graphics card driver to get X started, I should have re-installed. Going 
the Linux way, not the MS (you need to re-install the OS) way, I merrily DL'd 
KDE, and all the development stuff that I normally install. (lots of dialup 
time)

I have since put another install of FC5 on the same machine. Using the, once 
bitten twice shy premise, this time I customised the packages on the way 
through.

This is a light hearted reply, and see what you get from asking "why not".

I'm 57 years old, only started with computers in 1993, while encouraging my 
son to get into IT. Started with an old P1 with Win 98, then moved onto a new 
machine with XP preinstalled. I tried to get my son interested also in Linux. 
Always wanting to try out something a bit near the edge, I tried Linux, and 
have never turned back. My son's latest job is mainly working with MS OS's, 
but he did say they a machine with RH on it, so there is hope yet.

Incidentally, XP don't want to bootup on the machine it was originally 
installed on. There's a lot of 3rd party security on it, so I don't believe 
it's infected. I don't think it likes the idea that so many Linux distros are 
running on it's machine.
>
> > see it fixed, and clearly, at least with KDE, there is a problem at the
> > moment.
> >
> > Perhaps the bright spark who decided to remove the removable media
> > from /etc/fstab would post back, telling me how I can access my floppy
> > drive while logged into KDE.
>
> Unless the eventual plan is get rid of /etc/fstab entirely, then
> different file systems should not have their mounts described in
> different places and in different formats. Especially, I for one
> do not like systems automatically doing stuff without there being
> a place to control how they do it.
>
> > Nigel. (not too impressed with FC5)
Perhaps I was feeling a bit grumpy when I said that.lol.
>
> Hmm. Have you thought about Debian?

I am running Debian as well. 

Just 2 machines networked through a dedicated Smoothwall Express2 firewall, 
and onto the Internet with a serial (slow as hell on dialup) modem, but 
better than no connection.

!st machine has Win ME (just goes on line for 3rd party security updates), 
FC1,FC2,FC3, and the 2 instances of FC5.

2nd machine (the one that XP won't bootup on now) has FC1, FC2, FC3, 
FC4,Debian Sarge, Debian Sarge/Etch, Slackware 10.0, Gentoo (which as a 
newbie wasn't a bundle of fun to install).

Right. Run out of words now. Nigel.
>
> Mike
> --
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