Accessing the A Drive - OpenOffice 1.1

I can't figure out how to access the A drive. I have a document saved to a disk in my A drive (3 1/2 floppy) and now I want to open it from OpenOffice 1.1.

What the heck am I doing wrong? (Maybe my A drive is not recognized by SuSE 9.0?

Dave

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"So many electrons and so little time!!"
               73   K6DBH   Dave
        Also at, [email protected]
                            . .
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It's hard to tell you what you are doing "wrong" when you do not say what you are doing in the first place.

So ... try this.

1. Put the floppy in the floppy drive.

2. su to root (in an xterm or eterm, probably ... I surmise you are at an X display).

3. Enter this command:

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt

4a. If you get an error message at step 3 that you cannot interpret, post it here (quote it exactly and completely, please) and we'll try to help. (For example, SuSe 9.0 neither recognizes nor does not recognize "drive A". Particular Linux kernels will or will not have support for the floppy device itself, and will or will not have support for the msdos filesystem on a normal floppy made on a Windows host. The error message will tell you, or us, whether you have one of these problems.)

4b. If you do not get an error message at step 3, enter this command:

ls -l /mnt

5a. If you get an error message at step 4b that you cannot interpret, post it here (quote it exactly and completely, please) and we'll try to help.

5b. If you do not get an error message at step 4b, you should see your file listed as part of the response to that command.

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Ray steps 3 and 4b worked great and I can see my files listed witheh ls -l /mnt command. So now to I use copy commands to move the file back and forth to the hard drive so I can work with it in OpenOffice? or is there a way now to access the A drive from OpenOffice? I guess I was expecting that OpenOffice would give me the option of saving to the hard drive or to a floopy like Windows does. Is that not the case?

BTW, thanks for the line by line instructions. That would have taken some time to put together and I appreciate your time and help.

Dave

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"So many electrons and so little time!!"
               73   K6DBH   Dave
        Also at, [email protected]
                            . .
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


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At 10:42 PM 1/15/2004 -0800, Dave wrote:
[...]

I don't know how you have the root filesystem (/) set up on your computer. If it is fairly standard, you can use the cp command to copy the files from the floppy to your home directory. You'd do it with a command of this form (after you've mounted the floppy on /mnt as my prior message detailed)

cp /mnt/name_of_file /home/your_userid

making what I hope are obvious substitutions.

I haven't used OpenOffice on Linux, so I can't answer this directly. I would expect (based on using it on Windows) that its File-Open dialog box gives you some sort of GUI representation of the filesystem, permitting you to access the floppy drive at its mount point. /mnt .

BTW, "A drive" is purely DOS/Windows usage, not Linux usage; on Linux, the first floppy drive is associated with the device name /dev/fd0 . So if I take your question literally, the answer is NO, since Linux has no A drive as such. I've tried to answer the question you meant to ask, not the actual oe you asked.

As I said, I have not used OpenOffice on Linux. But I think the key problem for you is adjusting to the concept of filesystems having mount points rather than DOS/Windows style Drive Letters. With Linux systems, you can't just put a floppy in and have it recognized. You need to mount it after inserting it, and you should unmount it (though the actual command name is umount, no typo) before removing it, with the command

umount /mnt

There is a lot more you should learn about mount points, but it's too much for an e-mail response. Look at the file /etc/fstab to see how your system stores information about its filesystems. You can read the man page on fstab too, though I think it pretty murky for a beginner. Probably you want to read some introductory book, of the sort that people were discussing here a few days ago.

That's what this list is for. Glad I could help.

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