[5658] in Release_7.7_team
Re: ISO Stock answers: cdrecord on Athena.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Tue Nov 14 15:10:39 2006
In-Reply-To: <20061114102906.zsq10n0g70ckc8os@webmail.mit.edu>
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From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:10:18 -0500
To: Heather Anne Harrison <aurora@mit.edu>
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Summary:
1. I did a lot of unpleasant investigation.
2. The cdrecord locker is NOT the version we should tell people to use.
3. The author of cdrecord says that the version Red Hat and SuSE
deliver is bogus (to put it mildly).
4. There is good news: With modern 2.6 kernels, a lot of the bad
experience I had with connecting the dots has gone away. Whatever is
built into SuSE just worked for me, whether it be cdrecord, or
something else. The cdrecord that now ships with Athena in /usr/bin/
cdrecord seems to JUST WORK without specifying any options by hand.
Bottom Line:
The stock answer,
Q: How do I burn an ISO or disk image to a CD on an Athena Linux
workstation?
http://itinfo.mit.edu/answer.php?id=8245
should say, This information applies to Athena 9.4 with Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, the version 2.4 kernel, and the version of cdrecord
integrated in.
1. become root.
2. cdrecord file.iso
3. for further help on the myriad of options, do "man cdrecord".
Detail: (forgive my venting, but this situation brought home to me
how INCREDIBLY STUPID the Linux and open source "community" is about
something VERY basic.)
I've been loth to put effort into documenting how to burn ISOs on
Athena because I knew I would not enjoy it. Also because I expected
that,when all was said and done, the resulting proliferation of
options and lore required would be impossible to properly document.
Luckily, this time, the proliferation phase ended two years ago, and
now it's just a matter of a bunch of stubborn asses wending their way
to all traveling in the same direction.
This search has indeed been unpleasant. The state of Linux
documentation is horrendous! The latest official CD writing HOWTO
guides are vintage 2001, and so you "just have to know" in the Linux
oral tradition that, "all that stuff about the IDE SCSI driver is no
longer necessary with 2.6 kernels." Furthermore the guy who writes
the cdrecord program is doing it for pretty much ALL platforms, hates
Linux (and for good reason for what he's trying to do). His most
recent documentation seems to cover the exciting new Red Hat Linux
version 6.1! The author of cdrecord specifically states:
Both RedHat and SuSE publish bastardized and defective variants of
cdrtools in
their distributions. If you have problems on RedHat or SuSE systems,
first fetch a
recent original cdrtools source, compile it yourself and run the
original instead of
broken software that illegally claims to be cdrecord
So cdrecord is what EVERYONE uses as the bottom layer, but EVERY
individual that integrates it into their Linux distribution, or end-
user system has to do all the work of making it work, and there's no
forum for actually having that work benefit anyone else! The one in
the cdrecord locker at MIT is apparently built and maintained by some
anonymous SIPB member. So we have the world built upon a fragile,
unsupported, undocumented, deprecated base.
All THAT said, I then dug in and tried stuff out.
cdrecord in the cdrecord locker was last built in 2001. It's in arch/
i386_linux24 which means that it is **NOT** the version to tell
people to use. It's NOT the version that actually ran last time I
burned CD's on my Athena system!
The cdrecord that runs out of /usr/bin/cdrecord seems to
automagically detect the right device and do the right thing with it.
I wanted to further test this with other systems, but all the Athena
test cluster linux systems are in semi-broken states chasing down
some bug or other. I suppose at SOME point I should actually
attempt to burn a CD from the get-go in each of the Athena systems.
But at least now we know enough to craft a proper stock answer.
-wdc
On Nov 14, 2006, at 10:29 AM, Heather Anne Harrison wrote:
>
> Hi Bill,
>
> It occurred to me that you might want to review the existing ISO
> stock answers with an eye towards including them in the info for
> the linux util CD (seeing as almost all these systems are dual
> boot with windows). There is a windows stock answer on the
> subject (even if it was literally born yesterday).
>
> Burning CDs/ISO Images
> http://itinfo.mit.edu/answer.php?id=8227
>
> Heather Anne
> aurora@mit.edu
>
>
>
