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48 lines
2.1 KiB
48 lines
2.1 KiB
2005-06-07
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As I am wirting an answer to an email about the to-do in KFloppy,
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better have it in the source too.
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The biggest challenge was to support non-legacy (USB, IDE...) floppy drives.
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I have opened a way to it with what has the working title "user-given devices".
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(A better title for the feature would be a good thing too.
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It just mean that instead of selecting "Primary" or "Secondary" as floppy drive,
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you can give a device, like /dev/sda4 )
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The "user-given device" is pretty raw currently, allowing nearly no comfort for
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the user. So if you have an external drive (may a ZIP drive), you could try to
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make this mode better.
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A little variant would be to support the device like /dev/fd0u2880 for
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formatting. Currently it does not work with Full Format,
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as a "user-given device" is supposed not to be low-level formatable.
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(I do not know any Linux or BSD tool that can low-level format
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non-legacy drives.)
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Another thing that I have very recently discovered is that
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extended floppy drives will not work in "superfloppy" format
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(disks without partition table), as neither mkdosfs nor BSD's newfs allow this
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without a special parameter. (I have not checked the other tools used.)
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Before I forget it: in the "user-given device" mode, it would be nice if there
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was support from KDE (for example devices:/ ) to know what devices are really
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flopy drives (not that a user roasts an umounted partition of his harddisk.
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A much easier task would be perhaps to catch more errors from
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the external programs so that it is displayed to the user.
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(Also to catch anything error message having the string "error" in it,
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which is currently not done.)
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That is I think the list of what users could benefit.
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Internally, when the Qt4 switch is done, it would need a review to see how
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to improve the way how the classes calling the external applications are
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handled.
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Of course, when modifying, care must taken not to break the BSD part of the
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code. (Perhaps we need a way on Linux to be able to compile the BSD part,
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as there is nothing BSD specific in the code, only the external BSD programs
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are specific.)
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