So why did I even want to do this? Because the front panel of my PC has a 3 1/2" drive hole and I wanted to populate it.
Fine, real reason is because I have a few legacy machine lying around and having a floppy drive accessible is nice to have.
How does it work? Well I have a Floppy to USB adapter inside my rig, and since my motherboard has an unused set of USB 2 headers, I just plugged it into that.
Otherwise, it was just plug and play... almost.
Why the drive works as Plug and Play, linux mint pokes the USB to see if it's still there, so I have a small script at boot that disables it for that internal header.
I am just socked that it works, and while it sucks that I need to be root to read the disks, I am just happy that the whole setup works at all.
how does Linux handle "real" floppy drives (via the ISA bus)?
Most real floppy drives are on their own port. They show up as /dev/fd0
As I said above
So 1 adapter and 1 usb header, and it reads it as a USB Floppy, which I believe Linux has drivers for.
The device is shown as /dev/sdd (sda is 1TB SSD, sdb is hdd#1, and sdc is hdd#2)