Hi,
Thank you both for the speedy replies.
@guy:
Yes I did try saving to HD then copying across to floppy. This gave the same result as I mentioned in my original post in this thread. With respect to the drive eject button activity not being "caught" by the OS, I really was not aware of that. With respect to the drive using a cache, how do I check that this is indeed happening ? What do I look at ? BTW, thanks for both these points.
@johnhudson:
Yes, the floppy drive is a fixed one. I've now copied fstab to fstab_original and added
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto
to the end of fstab. I can now access the floppy drive to read files, as I previously could, provided that I take the following action. I must load a floppy disk into the drive after the B.I.O.S. "Boot Floppy Seek" has finished. (Failure to do so causes other boot problems.) This is workable.
When I run Dolphin, the floppy drive initially(!) does not show. However, if in Dolphin's left hand column I right click on an empty space under "Devices" and select "Show All Entries" from the pop up menu, then an entry for the floppy drive does then appear under "Devices". When I click on that entry the floppy drive is accessed and the files and directories are thereby made available, for reading!
(I then went into Yast/Security and User/User and Group Management where I found that user suse did not have floppy in their list of groups. Group floppy has now been added to suse's list of groups. I'm not sure if this was an oops(!).

)
This is fine as far as it goes. However, I still can't save a file to floppy disk. The problem now seems to be one of permissions. Using gEdit I prepared a small .txt file and tried to save that to the floppy disk. gEdit responded with the following error message:
"Could not save the file /media/floppy0/save_test.txt.
You do not have the permissions necessary to save the file. Please check that you typed the location correctly and try again."
I am familiar with using chmod to change the access permissions on a file. So I opened a terminal where I found that /media/floppy0 was owned by root. I then executed the various incarnations of chmod "copied and pasted" below.
dhcppc0:/media> su -
Password:
dhcppc0:~ # cd /media
dhcppc0:/media # ls -l
total 7
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 7168 Jan 1 1970 floppy0
dhcppc0:/media # chmod 777 floppy0
dhcppc0:/media # ls -l
total 7
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 7168 Jan 1 1970 floppy0
dhcppc0:/media # chmod +777 floppy0
dhcppc0:/media # ls -l
total 7
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 7168 Jan 1 1970 floppy0
dhcppc0:/media # chmod u=rwx floppy0
dhcppc0:/media # ls -l
total 7
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 7168 Jan 1 1970 floppy0
dhcppc0:/media # chmod u=rwx,g=rwx,o=rwx floppy0
dhcppc0:/media # ls -l
total 7
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 7168 Jan 1 1970 floppy0
dhcppc0:/media # chmod a+rwx floppy0
dhcppc0:/media # ls -l
total 7
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 7168 Jan 1 1970 floppy0
As you can see, floppy0 has stubbornly refused to change its access permissions. I've verified (most of) these usages of chmod with "LINUX IN A NUTSHELL" 3rd Ed., Chapter 3 "Linux Commands", p.63, chmod, "Examples".
What am I missing/have forgotten here ?
If someone could point me in the right direction to solve this last small problem I would be very grateful.
Thanks in advance.
Stuart