Burn, Baby, Burn!

My most recent accomplishment in the wonderful world of Linux was setting up my CD-RW. There were many obstacles on the path to realizing this dream, but all were overcome. I was originally using S.u.S.E 6.2 as my Operating system and was having difficulty getting the SCSI emulation to work on my Hewlett Packard 72000I 2x2x6 CDRW ATAPI drive. I did a great deal of research on this, reading many "How-to" documents, but to no avail. Finally, at the suggestion of Stephen Morrow, fellow writer, I decided it was time to upgrade my OS to Linux Mandrake 7.0.

After a surprisingly easy OS install, I typed the following command:

cdrecord -scanbus

This command scans the SCSI bus and lists all devices found there. This was the stepping stone that I dreaded the most. Despite my fears and trepidation, Linux detected my CDRW drive! The next step was to initiate the software to see if it really worked. There were two options with the software command, command line software and graphic interface software. The packages installed with Mandrake 7.0 include cdrecord and xcdroast, examples of both types of software. If they were not available with the install you can get them at http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.htmlarchive.org and http://www.fh-muenchen.de/home/ze/rz/services/projects/xcdroast/e_overview.htmlarchive.org respectively.

Many of the software sites have a continuing argument about the sg driver. Regardless of the mud slinging, the driver included with the kernel worked fine.

I must give credit to some of the excellent Howto files. The best ones that I found were at http://www.guug.de/~winni/linux/CD-Writing-HOWTO.htmlarchive.org and http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/software/xcdroast.htmlarchive.org.

If you have any stories or experiences similar or in general with hardware as a new user to Linux, please feel free to share them with me, Craig Bamford. Thank you for you continued attention and recognition and I will continue to strive to bring you the continued exploits of the New User.

Hewlett Packard is Copyright of the Hewlett Packard Company, 1994-2000.

Mandrake is Copyright of Mandrake Soft SA and Mandrake Soft, Inc. 1998, 1999, 2000.