[5661] in Release_7.7_team
Re: [RHE] ISO Stock answers: cdrecord on Athena.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Erica H Peterson)
Tue Nov 14 15:50:17 2006
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:50:08 -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
In-Reply-To: <10146B1A-B332-49BD-A79F-816EAB0A1EFA@MIT.EDU>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.62L.0611141549470.3909@zanshin.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
X-Spam-Flag: NO
X-Spam-Score: 0.00
Yes, it works on Athena :)
Erica
On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, William Cattey wrote:
> 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
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Rhe-release mailing list
>>> Rhe-release@mit.edu
>>> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/rhe-release
>>>
>
>
