Several people have noticed that Linux has a bad tendency of killing floppy drives. These failures remained completely mysterious, until somebody noticed that they were due to huge layers of dust accumulating in the floppy drives. This cannot happen under Messy Dos, because this excuse for an operating system is so unstable that it crashes roughly every 20 minutes (actually less if you are running Windows). When rebooting, the BIOS seeks the drive, and by doing this, it shakes the dust out of the drive mechanism. diskseekd simulates this effect by seeking the drive periodically. If it is called as diskseek, the drive is seeked only once.
3 comments:
There's another section entitled Bugs:
1. Other aspects of Messy Dos' flakiness are not simulated.
2. This section lacks a few smileys.
Seriously though, this was an existing need in the old days when floppies were still relevant, because Linux computers would typically run for months without a single reboot. It's one of those programs that were written to "scratch an itch". :^)
In other news, my new computer is completely floppy- (and ribbon-cable-) free. Yay! Hopefully in a few years our PCs (and peripherals) will be completely legacy-free. In the meantime, the lack of a parallel port on my current motherboard is really pissing me off, because I can't connect my laser printer.
Good luck with your printer integration. Manufacturers prefer USB for anything these days.
Thanks! At least the motherboard has an internal parallel port connector, and I've just found a bracket that connects to it on eBay. We'll see how this goes. The downside is that my computer won't be ribbon-cable-free any more ;^), but it's a cleaner (and cheaper!) solution than either a parallel port PCI card or a parallel-to-USB cable.
In the meantime, I might give my BlueTooth printer adapter another chance...
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