[index]

Tue Oct 17 21:50:58 CEST 2006

CD/DVD Burning

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Ever since I switched from the 2.4 kernel, burning CDs on
linux from the command line just hasnt been easy. To be
honest, burning CDs has never been what I'd call easy. 'Easy'
is folding paper airplanes, scratching an itch, typing
'String' by mistake when you want to type 'Sting' (as the
artist), etc. But in the 2.4 series, if you knew how to do it,
it was a non-trivial job. It went something like this:


compile in various scsi options into the kernel (or use modules),
load the modules, or reboot on a new lilo or grub.

add yourself to group burn or something similar. Or just 777 the
/dev/{cdrw,cdrom,whatnot} if you're lazy

scan your emulated scsi bus, find your cd recorder scsi id (cdrecord
-scanbus I think it was).

make an iso image: mkisofs -r -o foo.iso /folder/to/burn

burn desired directory with cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -data foo.iso



I happily scripted burning tools, and it worked well for some time.

Then something happened. I tried upgrading to kernel 2.6.n and my
scripts stopped working. I looked into it and discovered that I could
point cdrecord at /dev/hdc (my cd burner) instead of scsi id
0,0,0. Perhaps this was a feature which always existed. Dunno. But
that didnt work. Or it did, sometimes, on some kernels. I was like
huh? and it didnt help that I bought a DVD burner around that
time. Its just confused things even more. I tried reading various
man-pages, I surfed the web, and nothing seemed to work. I discovered
the tool growisofs, but for some weird reason it didnt work. Finally I
gave up on the cli burning idea, and just used k3b, which, for some
reason, worked.

When looking back, I have no idea what I was doing at the time. The
whole burning of CDs and DVDs is really, really, really
simple. Today I just googled for 'simple
use of growisofs', and it was all there. Very easy, very
simple. Actually, it pretty much worked straight away.

Very nice.

But the question remains- what the heck did I do wrong back then? It
could be one or many of the following reasons:


 Over the last four years I've gotten more used to installing and
administering linux.

 Over the last four years the kernels have gotten more reliable
(yeah, just blame someone else:)

 Maybe there weren't as many pages on the web describing growisofs
back then.

 I was brain-dead back then since I had just become a father, with
all the loss of sleep it entails.


Dunno. Has anyone else suddenly discovered that burning has again
become an easy task under kernel2.6? Or is it really just me?

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