Comment 110 for bug 255651

For older motherboards that require a floppy to update the BIOS, it's easily done from a bootable floppy disk. Back in the days when I used to run Windows, I always did it that way because I didn't trust having Windows running while doing something as critical as a BIOS update. The OS installed on the HDD is irrelevant. As long as all the hardware is correct and properly recognized by the motherboard, you don't even have to have an OS installed to do a BIOS update and in fact, many system builders will argue that it's a good idea to update the BIOS prior to installing the OS.

I don't mean this to be a dismissal of the need for floppy support. It's still needed by people for other use cases with devices that only read/write their data to floppy. It's just that for BIOS management, it's simply not needed.

If you read through the link provided in #108 above, you will find several mentions of (relatively) simple cli solutions for mounting and unmounting the floppy. These can be semi-automated to 1 click solutions as launchers on the top panel. Not ideal, but a usable workaround till this (hopefully) gets fixed.