Date   : Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:47:41 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Writing BBC Disc Images on Linux

Ian Wolstenholme wrote:
> I went to the Omniflop website to see if there was a version I could
> download for Linux (Ubuntu specifically) and it said there was no need
> because Linux already has utilities built in for reading and writing 
> floppy discs in various formats.
> 
> So how do I do this?

Others have mentioned 'dd'...

You might also want to have a look at the fdutils package ('man fdrawcmd' 
should give you some info if it's all present on your system) as this is in 
theory far more flexible - the downside being that it's a bit of a pig to use :-)

I'm not aware of anything which can handle *really* weird floppy formats[1] or 
do various clever tricks with the floppy controller - from what I recall, even 
fdutils talks to the low-level kernel floppy interface, not to the hardware 
directly (as I suspect Omniflop does). To do more you'd need a completely 
different kernel-level custom floppy driver (I looked at the Linux floppy code 
once... yikes)

[1] BBC ones generally don't fall into this category IME, barring a few with 
oddball copy-protection schemes (e.g. most of Jon Thackray's adventures, 
IIRC). 'dd' and fdutils almost certainly won't cope with those (be interesting 
to know if Omniflop can, actually)

My main gripe isn't the access, but the archive formats - most of them seem to 
be utterly braindead with little or no stored geometry, metadata, error 
information etc.

cheers

Jules