Does Solus support IDE and Floppy drives?

Astro224

Hello,
I have been experimenting with Solus OS over the past few weeks and absolutely love it, but I have a few questions related to floppy and IDE drives. Solus OS doesn't seem to recognize my internal floppy (diskette) drive, or my IDE hard drive. At first I thought they just needed to be mounted, but it seems as if the OS doesn't even realize the drives exist. How can I get Solus to recognize my floppy and IDE drives?

My machine is an old HP DC7600. The floppy drive is an internal one with a floppy ribbon connector. The IDE hard drive is also internal and uses the IDE ribbon connector. The IDE hard drive is formatted in FAT, and the Diskette is formatted in the standard IBM DOS format. Thanks in advance for your time and any help you can provide!

JoshStrobl

I'd be surprised if we support any floppy drives. I'd be surprised if we have IDE drive support enabled (at least completely), we have CONFIG_HAVE_IDE set but CONFIG_IDE isn't set. I don't see us enabling support either.

Solus probably also isn't the most optimal experience for a PC going on 15 years old, we target much more modern hardware.

Astro224

JoshStrobl
Thanks for your reply Josh. I kind of expected Solus not having support for older hardware that is long out of date, just wanted to be sure that a lack of hardware support was indeed my problem. I really appreciate your insight. I suppose I will have to look into a distro more suited to my hardware needs.

As an interesting side note, Solus runs surprisingly well on the system despite its age. Web browsing, file management, basic 3d modeling, and music playing all work great with no issues. The system does run into trouble playing video, but that is to be expected given the age of the graphics card.

Thanks again, Cheers!

JoshStrobl

@Astro224 Yea I'm certainly not saying you can't run Solus on it, we just do very specific optimizations that target features and instruction set support in "new" CPUs and GPUs. We're obviously not interested (nor is it really viable) in supporting every bit of hardware under the sun and I'd be happy with you using any Linux-based operating system that simply works best for you and your hardware, even if that isn't Solus 🙂

Hopefully you find something that supports the drive though. You might have luck with a release of Ubuntu.

Astro224

JoshStrobl
I completely understand. I just thought you might like to know how stable the OS is on older machines.

My DC7600 mostly serves as a compatibility machine for viewing data on floppies, IDE drives, optical media, etc. I will actually be installing Solus on my newer everyday computer sometime in the near future because I love the look and feel so much. Thanks for helping create such a wonderful Distro! Cheers!