I was able to mount and read floppies just as I should,
however I still can't format a disc.

There are utilities that you can install in Synaptic such as kfloppy (KDE),
kmformat (KDE), gnome-utils (includes gfloppy), and fdutils. Apparently you can
right click on the floppy icon when you go to Places, Computer, but I can't
confirm this as I have no floppy drive.