[ale] Auto-mount floppy in Fedora

[Kenneth W Cochran]

>Subject: Re: [ale] Auto-mount floppy in Fedora
>From: "James P. Kinney III" <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
>To: mnmagee at juno.com, Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
>Date: 19 Jul 2004 23:13:20 -0400
>
>On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 20:09, Matthew Magee wrote:
>
>> According to my A+ book, pin 34 on a floppy drive signals
>> insertion/ejection of a disk, so the mechanism appears to be there.  On
>> my Mandrake 9.2 system I can insert/eject a floppy at will.  Does not
>> open a Konqueror window though.  Still have to do that myself.
>
>Yep. There in theory only. Since the floppy drive was invented during
>the DOS era (error?) and MS-DOS never supported a way to auto-check it
>was never actually used.

As I remember, even Plain Old DOS (or perhaps more specifically,
*applications* in MS/PC-DOS) would indeed detect floppy-disk
changes, for example, the MS/PC-DOS "backup" command when
spanning multiple floppies.  You would get a message like
"disk change detected on drive <some letter>."  And/or some
program would not continue (e.g. backup) would not continue
until it detected a disk change.

-kc

>That said, it may be time to grab a floppy and do some cable prodding to
>see if pin 34 really does change state on insertion.
>
>[...snip...]
>
>--
>James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
>CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
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