[5659] in Release_7.7_team
Re: [RHE] ISO Stock answers: cdrecord on Athena.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Erica H Peterson)
Tue Nov 14 15:33:23 2006
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:33:20 -0500 (EST)
From: Erica H Peterson <astronut@MIT.EDU>
To: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
cc: Heather Anne Harrison <aurora@MIT.EDU>, rhe-release@MIT.EDU,
release-team@MIT.EDU
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Really, if you want to burn a CD on Athena linux, I highly recommend
burning directly from Nautilus (the graphical file browser). For an ISO,
right-click on the file and select "burn to disc." For a non-disc-image
data disc, go to "Go -> CD Creator" in the Nautilus menu, drag the files
you want in there, and then do File -> Write to Disc. It should "just
work."
Cheers,
Erica
On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, William Cattey wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
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