PyFloppy
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
Besides Tcl/Tk >= 8.4, Python >= 2.3 and Tkinter you will need fdformat, mke2fs and
mkdosfs. I guess anyone will have these, anyway.
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 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.
News
June 27 2005: Pyfloppy-1.2
The path to fdformat, mke2fs and mkdosfs is now no longer hardcoded, but
automatically guessed, so it's no problem anymore if one of these is
installed somewhere else than on my Mandrake box.
Dylan Wakefield has contributed an ebuild script, that
Gentoo users may find useful for installing pyfloppy (I admit I didn't know
what to do with it, so I did not pack it into the tarball; hints are
welcome). Please note: there is also a patch for pyfloppy-1.1, which is now
obsolete.
April 12 2006: Pyfloppy-1.3
Pyfloppy now has a workaround that fixes problems that would have caused trouble on
some buggy installs of Tcl with multithreading support. The gui was slightly polished, too.
Aug. 13 2006: Pyfloppy-1.4
A workaround for a bug that would stop Pyfloppy from working with Python-2.4 and Tk-8.5
was added. The shell output window was improved again and now seems to handle backspace characters
properly. Gentoo users can find an updated ebuild script (see link above) for Pyfloppy-1.3
which I think should work with Pyfloppy-1.4 as well (no files added or removed). I recently switched
to use debian, so I will not ship rpm packages anymore, however I kept the spec file in the tarball,
so anyone should be able to build their own.
Aug. 23 2006: Pyfloppy-1.5
I fixed a minor bug in the shell output window: in some cases inserting a newline would have caused
the previous line to be deleted. I also updated the pot-file and the german translation.
Aug. 28 2006: Pyfloppy-1.6
I added a spanish translation contributed by Martintxo and fixed a typo in install.sh which caused the doc files to be
installed into the pyfloppy-1.4 directory instead of the pyfloppy-1.5 directory.
License
PyFloppy is licensed under the terms of the
Gnu General Public License.
Download
pyfloppy-1.6.tar.bz2 (20 kB)
Feedback
Send bug reports and any other feedback to:
Michael Lange <klappnase (at) freakmail (dot) de>
