Good questions.  some half answers:

Floppies other than connected to the archaic floppy port are difficult to
use under Linux... all my systems have LS-120 floppy drives (yes, these
read and write standard 1.44 floppies) connected to the IDE port; and in
several years, I've never been able to get "make boot disk" or "format
floppy" to work under any flavor of Linux.  Discouraging.

Ctrl+Alt+F1 to virtual terminal 1; Ctrl+Alt+F7 (usually) is the first (and
generally only) Xwindow.

The pipe "|" is shift of the backslash "\" on most keyboards.

\\/
http://www.wlindley.com