
                         The floppy formatting utility

   This  utility  program low-level formats floppy disks. This utility is
   capable of formatting floppies in LS-120 "Superdisk" ATAPI IDE drives,
   in addition to the standard floppy controller drives. ATAPI IDE floppy
   format  required  Linux  kernel  2.4.10, or higher. For earlier kernel
   versions:

   The patch file linux-2.4.0.patch.txt is for kernel 2.4.0.

   The  patch  file linux-2.4.0-0.96.patch.txt is for the 0.96 version of
   ide-floppy.c

   The patch file linux-2.4.7.patch.txt is for kernel 2.4.7.

   The patch file linux-2.4.7-ac3.patch.txt is for kernel 2.4.7-ac3.

   The  patch  file  linux-2.2.16.patch.txt  is  for  kernel  2.2.16 (and
   2.2.17, probably).

   Please  don't  ask  me how to apply kernel patches. If you know how to
   build  and  compile  the  Linux  kernel,  you know how to apply kernel
   patches.

   The  floppy  utility can still be used without applying these patches.
   You'll just get a jazzed-up version of fdformat.

   WARNING:  Do  not  attempt  to  format  120 mb super-floppies. There's
   nothing  in  the  floppy  utility  that  blocks any attempt to issue a
   request  to  format  a  disk, if the floppy drive claims it can do so.
   Some  LS-120  drives claim to be able to format 120 mb super-floppies,
   even   though   these   disk  are  factory-formatted,  AND  CANNOT  be
   user-formatted.  An  attempt  to  do  so  will permanently destroy the
   superfloppy disk.

Compiling

   To  compile  this  floppy  utility  you  need  to  install the libpopt
   library.  It  is a small library used to parse command line arguments.
   It  is  included  in most Linux distributions by default. If you don't
   have  it,  grab  it from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/code/popt and
   install it.

   You  will  also  need  to  have  the GTK toolkit installed in order to
   compile  the  GTK  front  end  to  the floppy utility. Without the GTK
   toolkit only the command-line utility will be compiled and installed.

   Compiling the floppy utility is straightforward:
./configure
make
make install (if you care, you can simply run it from the current directory
too).

   That's  it. By default, floppy will install in /usr/local/bin, and use
   /usr/local/etc/floppy  as its configuration file. The configure script
   accepts the usual options:
     * --prefix=/usr    --    installs    /usr/bin/floppy,    and    uses
       /usr/etc/floppy
     * --sysconfdir=/etc -- use /etc/floppy as the configuration file

   Therefore:

   --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc

   This  configuration  installs /usr/bin/floppy, and uses /etc/floppy as
   its configuration file.

   The floppy utility can also be built by RPM:

   rpmbuild -ta floppy-version.tar.(gz|bz2)

   Please  see  the  installed  manual page for instructions on using the
   floppy utility.

Red Hat 9

   Red Hat 9 includes the console floppy binary in "util-linux", but does
   not  include  floppygtk,  the  GTK  wrapper. Including floppygtk makes
   util-linux depend on X, which will not work very well.

   The easiest way to get floppygtk working with Red Hat 9 is to use this
   mouthfull:

rpmbuild -ta --define '_prefix /usr/local' \
             --define '_mandir /usr/local/share/man' \
        floppy-0.14.tar.bz2

   floppy  and  floppygtk will now install into /usr/local, and the Gnome
   link  will  start  the  /usr/local  version.  The only problem is that
   running  'floppy'  from  gnome-terminal  will  run the gtk-wrapperless
   /usr/bin   version.  So  you  can't  start  the  GTK  wrapper  from  a
   gnome-terminal window, but the Gnome menu link will work.
