In some installations users might not, by default, have access to the
floppy drive. Generally the floppy device (/dev/fd0) belongs
to group floppy and the administrator may need to add a user
to this group to grant them access. This can be done simply with the
Gnome interface from Applications-->System Tools-->Users and Groups. Refer to
Chapter 43 for details on managing groups.
Alternatively, from the command line the following has the same
effect: