Comment 244 for bug 441835

Martin, I fully understand, from your angle - developer -, your personal opinion/point of view re ...'(as much of a pain as floppy disks are in the first place..)'....

however, I'm kindly asking you to make the effort and look at this issue from user's point of view as well as ubuntu's os present and future community needs and wishes.

It is a fact of life, like it or hate it, that floppy devices/floppy disks are still the primary devices most used in bootloaders/os recovery (all major ones fit very nicely on 1.44 floppies for this very reason), BIOS upgrade operations, and many, many other operations and reasons (for sure/I am convinced that you're aware of them, cost, elegance of code etc among them; there's no reason to list them all here).

all major pc manufacturers recognize the importance of floppy devices for the very reasons above listed and have floppy drives interfaces built on their motherboards; there are portable floppy drives that use usb interfaces for laptops/notebooks. sure there are users/oem's do not want/consider that such devices should be installed in the first place - it is their choice and they have to live with that. in this case, as said above ....'You're trying to use a floppy disk, in 2010, and then asking what you're doing wrong!? (-; '.... no doubt applies.

but, at the same time, there is a sizable number of users in the community that do have floppy devices installed and want to use them for their own reasons - it is their choice and I feel that that should be respected. so, the question is - should/must this community of users be deprived to enjoy the benefits of the very choice they made ? because the os, for whatever reason, does not recognize/configure properly the device ?.

Martin, going back to ...'None of the devs have a floppy disk, so debugging them is a pain'.... issue is a problem, then please allow me to offer you and Sebastien, (the two devs that I retain from this thread), two floppy drives complete with interface cables and 10 floppy diskettes absolutely free, just for the purpose of testing and debugging. or even faster and to the point action, please acquire locally in Germany the two floppy kits mentioned and send me an e-mail what the total cost was and I will cheerfully and immediately mail you a personal cheque of that amount. TU.