Re: Floppy handling

Ian McKellar (yakk-linux-kernel@yakk.net.au)
Fri, 9 Jun 2000 16:03:47 +0800

On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 11:45:52PM -0600, Richard Stallman wrote:
> Is there any possibility of making Linux handle file systems on
> floppies like MSDOS, so that there is no need to explicitly mount and
> unmount a floppy drive in order to access floppies through the file
> system?
>
> Because of the inconvenience of mounting and unmounting floppies, I
> never do that; I only use mcopy. mcopy is covenient enough, for
> people who don't mind learning another few commands. But that isn't
> very easy for non-hackers, the kind of people who now prefer Windows.
> A complaint from a non-hacker about this is what inspired me to write
> this message.
>
> We want to make GNU/Linux appeal to Windows users, and this is one of
> the things necessary to do that. And if MSDOS could do this, surely
> we can.

I've been looking at implementing msdos filesystem support in the GNOME
VFS (virtual filesystem) layer. This way users could be given read and
write access to the device (eg: /dev/fd0) and the filesystem stuff
would happen at the library level. This wouldn't be as fast (due to the
lack of caching) and would only be available to GNOME programs, but I
think its a solution to the problem.

I would also like to do the same thing with HFS (the MacOS filesystem).
My major stumbling block is finding msdos/hfs code licensed or
relicensable under the LGPL (which is what gnome-vfs is distributed
under). I might approach the authors of the relevant kernel modules or
userland applications and see if they're willing to relicense.

My Evil Hack From Hell(tm) is to write code to load Linux kernel modules.

Ian

-- 
Ian  McKellar |    Email: yakk(a)yakk.net |    Web: http://www.yakk.net/
Area: +61 (8) | Home: 9389 9152 | Fax/Voice: 9260 2903 | Work: 9384 4700


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