Re: [gentoo-user] Where is my /dev/fd0?

[Joshua Murphy <poisonbl@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 7:45 PM, Marcus Wanner <marcusw@cox.net> wrote:
> On 12/17/2009 5:16 PM, Neil Bothwick wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:21:28 -0500, Marcus Wanner wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>
>>>> It's not IDE (IDE/ATAPI floppy support is for things like LS-120
>>>> drives), but CONFIG_BLK_DEV_FD, found in Device Drivers ->   Block
>>>> devices ->   Normal floppy disk support. If it's compiled as a module,
>>>> maybe you just need to modprobe floppy?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> I looked at that path in the config, it turns out that it was disabled
>>> (by default! why?).
>>>
>>
>> For the same reason that support for punched card readers is disabled by
>> default.
>>
>
> But they're so useful...and the computer we got a year ago had one. Do
> things really go obsolete like that after decades of prevalence?
>
> Marcus

Yep... why deal with floppies when you can get a tiny little stick
that'll hold about 5688 times as much (8GB), read and write faster, is
more portable, and costs about $20 US on Newegg (without shopping
around even a little to find one on sale). Windows XP is the last big
reason I've dealt with floppy drives in the past 2/3 of a decade or so
now, and that's only because the only other option in getting screwy
chipset drivers at install time is to rebuild the install media
(nforce fake raid on Dell XPSes, more often than not).

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy