Comment 245 for bug 441835

Hello Peter,

peter b [2010-08-31 17:36 -0000]:
> 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.

Thanks for the offer. However, I'm being paid for developing Ubuntu,
so if I'd get floppy drives, I'd certainly pay for them myself, or
expense them. Anyway, it'll be very hard to try and fit an IDE floppy
disk into a laptop :-), so at most this could be an USB drive; no idea
whether these are broken as well.

I guess another option would be to use kvm and an emulated drive.

So this by and large requires someone to spend half a day on. We
already tried to fix this twice, and each time it broke something
else. This is a really hard problem, I'm afraid, due to how floppies
work (or more importantly, what they are missing -- media change
interrupts).