Are PCMCIA floppy drives still supported by Suse I.e. Y E Flashbuster FDD as used on numerous older laptops; Vaio, Compaqs, Toshiba’s etc?
I’ve tested Ubuntu which seems to have dropped PCMCIA support completely.
Let me say that in general Floppy disks using a floppy port or a pcmcia port don’t work very well in Linux. The only floppy support I can get to work lately is USB floppy drives which does seem to work, but in general the media is out of production and floppy drives mostly exist as used devices. If you really want to use a floppy disk, get yourself a USB drive and search online for floppy media and buy it while you can. While its been ages since I used a pcmcia port of any kind, which was changed to PC CARD Bus as I remember, you can run YaST Software Management, search on pcmcia and there is a package you can installed called pcmciautils, mostly CLI based apps, but you might find something useful there. Should you find a USB floppy, I have a bash script you can use to format it here:
S.U.F.F. - SuSE USB Floppy Formatter - Version 1.28 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums
Thank You,
Like jdmcdaniel3 I have had no problems with a USB floppy and openSUSE. I have a machine from 2000 which has a floppy drive and I have had no problems with Debian on that. So it may be a case of ‘suck it and see.’
The PCMCIA floppy interface used in the Compaq Aero and a few other laptops is not yet supported by this package.PCMCIA cards not work on Dell Latitude e5510 under Windows XP. Works fine on Windows 7. Cards are recognized by Device Manager but do not work correctly. The snag in supporting the Aero floppy is that the Aero seems to use a customized PCMCIA controller to support DMA to the floppy.