Hi Wolfgang, What would you say about using Solid to probe floppy drives? I think Solid already has the necessary hooks, but if it doesn't, we can add them.
Thanks, Boudhayan Freundliche Grüße Boudhayan Gupta KDE e.V. - Sysadmin and Community Working Groups +49 151 71032970 On 15 February 2017 at 19:50, Wolfgang Bauer <wba...@tmo.at> wrote: > On 11 February 2017 at 13:44, Jonathan Riddell <j...@jriddell.org> wrote: >> I recommend KFloppy be removed from Applications releases. It >> couldn't find my floppy drive and when I hacked the code to tell it >> where to look it depended on an external tool fdformat which didn't >> work anyway. > > KFloppy and fdformat work fine here in openSUSE, I do use it regularly (with > an internal floppy drive). > > And as the current maintainer, I'd prefer to (try to) fix problems instead of > having it dropped. > > I'm a bit surprised that in the test the floppy drive showed up as /dev/sdc > though, mine always have been and still are at /dev/fd0... > I suppose that was an external one? > Not sure how to fix that then, it supposedly can be a random /dev/sdX... > > There is a (somewhat "hidden") feature though to use any device you want: just > enter it into the text field (this is mentioned in the documentation, it's a > rather old feature already and intended to be able to format USB sticks too, > or other unpartitioned devices). > It would definitely be possible to list all /dev/sdX devices in the chooser > too, but that may be dangerous and cause data loss without any further check > that it is really a floppy drive (or USB stick). > I have to think about that one. > > I am aware of one particular problem related to permissions though: > Normally the device can only be accessed by members of the group "disk" (or > "floppy"), but modern distributions tend to not add users to these groups any > more. > > You'd have to add the user to the appropriate group manually to make KFloppy > and fdformat work, or run KFloppy as root. > Not great, I agree. > > Actually I was thinking about this problem recently though. > > The error message could definitely be improved. > > And one "solution" would probably be to make KFloppy offer to restart itself > as root (if it detects insufficient permissions) like partitionmanager does > it. > Or maybe use kauth to run the external commands as root. > > I will work on that. > > Suggestion would of course be welcome (for both problems). > > Btw, fdformat is only used for a "Full Format". > A "Quick Format" uses mkfs and friends instead, and "Zero out" uses dd. > The same permissions problem would apply there though of course. > (just like as you would run partitionmanager as user) > >> It's only feature is to format a disc and arguably >> support could be added to partitonmanager although it didn't work when >> I tried it. > > Well, personally I would find it a bit overkill to run a tool like > partitionmanager to format a floppy disk. > And it's probably not really obvious either, as a floppy disk normally doesn't > have partitions. > >> We seem to have no great solution to playing audio CDs, dragonplayer >> doesn't understand playlists so can't select a track, amarok doesn't >> see any tracks > > Amarok does see audio CD tracks here, but as it is still KDE4 based it also > requires a KDE4 based kio_audiocd which is no longer part of KDE Applications. > > We still package the last released one as kio_audiocd4 in openSUSE (mainly for > amarok actually)... > > Kind Regards, > Wolfgang >