The Gnome tool to format a floppy disk is gfloppy, as shown in Figure 33.1. This can be accessed from Applications-->System Tools-->Floppy Formatter.

Figure 33.1: The Gnome floppy formatter.

From the command line there are several options. You can format the floppy with:

$ superformat /dev/fd0

Similarly the command:

  $ fdformat /dev/fd0

will also format a floppy, but does not create an file system. A file system can be created with mkdosfs. You could put, instead of a MSDOS file system on the floppy, a Linux file system with:

  $ mkfs -t ext2 /dev/fd0