PyFloppy 1.6

PyFloppy is yet another floppy formatting tool, this one written in Python / Tkinter.

The reason for writing pyfloppy was that I had been sick and tired of problems when using gfloppy; sometimes it gave me error messages on broken floppies that worked fine when I formatted them from the command line, other times there were no error messages when the floppy was definitely broken; sometimes it even worked without problems.

I always found it annoying that I didn't ever know what gfloppy was really doing and where the error messages came from, so I decided to write my own program that gives me more control on what happens in the background. For the same reason I decided not to use a pretty graphical progress bar but old fashioned text output; in fact everything is old fashioned here, no superformatting stuff (not to tell of extra-super-1.9MB floppies), however since I use pyfloppy I never had problems anymore (well, at least with floppy formatting ....).

You can specify any option the background programs accept, and pyfloppy will remember the settings you made at the last session. I put in a default option for mke2fs ( -m 0 , which means that 0 % of the storage are being reserved for the superuser, because I did not want the default 5 % of mke2fs), but if you remove it once you can easily get rid of that, in case you do not like it. The -v (verbose) option for mkdosfs is mandatory, because without it you would not get much output, so it does not need to be specified separately; the -c and -cc options can be toggled with radiobuttons, so they don't need to be specified either.

Requirements:

· Tcl/Tk >= 8.4
· Python >= 2.3
· Tkinter
· fdformat
· mke2fs
· mkdosfs

Bugs:

Maybe your system uses non standard descriptors for your floppies device nodes, this might cause fdformat to fail.

Pyfloppy tries the older standard first (like /dev/fd0 + H1440 , Q720, D360 for 3.5" drives , lower case letters for 5.25" drives, if these are not found the newer standard with an "u" instead of H,Q,D is used). If none of these is found, the standard device node (like "/dev/fd0") is tried, so if fdformat doesn't work the missing device node might be the problem.

If anyone uses a floppy device other than /dev/fd0, /dev/fd1, /dev/floppy/0, /dev/floppy/1 (maybe an USB drive) you will also have bad luck, simply because I did not implement this. However this could easily be added, so please tell me if you miss your floppy device here.

What's New in This Release:

· A Spanish translation has been added.



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