Do you have to create a mount point and mount the drives
to be able to use them, in Unix that is what was required.

Well, unix has evolved considerably, via the linux branch of the family
tree. Removable media are now detected and mounted automatically upon
insertion.

The floppy access ought to just work, if root can access them then it's
a permissions issue. If you want to access them as FAT formatted
floppies, mtools is the easiest way. mformat, mcopy, and other commands
from dos with a prepended m are used for the i/o operations.

chmod doesn't seem to have any effect.

Would love to know though why the gui doesn't work. It
would be a lot faster to drag and drop than use the command
line for some of what I'd like to do.

Not that anyone uses floppies anymore but you'd think something
as basic as this ought to work. It did in Mandriva, though
that was KDE. I tried Kubuntu but samba was broken so I
stuck with gnome. I guess I have to decide what broken
features I have to live with.

Floppy is really no longer support since 8.10.
www.linuxquestions.org/.../ubuntu-8.1-wont-use-th\
e-floppy-disk-drive-681634/

I don't think that I have ever been able to get a floppy drive to work
on an Ubuntu box. Granted, the need was nil. I just have a lot of old
files on floppy disks and I've tried them at least once out of curiosity
with every distro that I've used for any amount of time.

"fd0 is not a block device"..............