[Wine] Re: Disk drive question

[SpawnHappyJake]

Hi Doug! Wine is a lot better now! Still far from perfect, but boy does it do some things well.

First, are you in Linux? Because I know with Linux Mint there is an issue mounting floppy discs, and I wanted to make sure at least the floppy was mounting in Linux (or whatever the OS may be) before you attempt to mount it in Wine.

You just open winecfg, go to the Drives tab, and assign drive letters to directories of your real filesystem where you have things mounted. For example, if the floppy is mounted at /media/dougs_sober_floppy, you can assign "A:\" to that directory (path) via winecfg. Of course, only programs ran through WINE will see any of these "assigned" DOS drive letters. In fact, they only apply to programs ran (in WINE)  under that particular prefix (the prefix you were running winecfg under).

I've heard that Wine is supposed to automatically mount detected mounted discs, but I have not seen this happen personally.

Furthermore, does your program actually check to see if it is being installed off a floppy/ CD? Because if it were me, I'd be afraid of the floppy giving out/ getting near a magnet/ something. Do you have an image backup of your CD and of your floppy?

If it's not checking to see if it's actually on a floppy, you can just mount the floppy image (using the mount command) and not worry about having to remember to bring an external floppy reader next time you go install this software on a computer.

If it actually is checking to see if it is being installed off a CD, CDEmu can fix that, at least for Linux. CDEmu is free and open source. Unfortunately, I'm pretty darn sure that a floppy emulator for Linux does not exist, because, just for fun, those are the kinds of things I look for and I searched hard for one and couldn't find one, not that I would actually need it. But there is always the far extreme of installing VirtualBox, mounting the floppy image into a virtual machine to use its floppy emulator, and then network share that floppy to your real machine. Well, I know you can network share CD drives, and I'm merely assuming the same can be done with a floppy.

Hope it goes well for you!

P.S. There is a free floppy emulator for Windows that I have used (and it works great): http://vfd.sourceforge.net/. Google did not reveal the older site, I guess they moved to Source Forge. Oh wait. That means they're open source now. Cool!

Enjoy the holidays!
Jake