[5660] in Release_7.7_team
Re: [RHE] ISO Stock answers: cdrecord on Athena.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Tue Nov 14 15:48:11 2006
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.62L.0611141531070.3909@zanshin.mit.edu>
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Cc: Heather Anne Harrison <aurora@MIT.EDU>, rhe-release@MIT.EDU,
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From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:47:53 -0500
To: Erica H Peterson <astronut@MIT.EDU>
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Does that work on Athena these days? I know it works with SuSE, but
was afraid to try it on Athena.
-wdc
----
William Cattey
Linux Platform Coordinator
MIT Information Services & Technology
W92-157, 617-253-0140, wdc@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/
On Nov 14, 2006, at 3:33 PM, Erica H Peterson wrote:
>
> 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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>>
