Burn CDs on Linux

If your writer is not already installed and working, you need to first make Linux recognize it. For that append the following lines in the file named modules.conf in /etc directory.

options ide-cd ignore=hdd 



alias scd0 sr_mod 


pre-install sg


modprobe ide-scsi 


pre-install sr_mod


modprobe ide-scsi 


pre-install ide-scsi


modprobe ide-cd

Refer to the box alongside and in the first line replace ‘hdd’ according to the IDE interface your writer is connected to–hda, hdb, hdc or hdd. The following steps are required to mount and read the CD in the writer. If the CD writer is the only CD drive on your system, in the file named ‘fstab’ in /etc directory remove the word ‘kudzo’ in the line for /dev/cdrom so that it looks as follows:

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0

Here the first entry specifies the file pointing to the CD Writer device file. The second entry specifies the mount point. Save the file and issue the command:

ln -sf /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrom

If you have a CD ROM drive also, then you must find out the file pointing to the device file for CD Writer. Issue the command:

ls —l /dev/cdrom*

In our case, where the CD ROM drive was secondary master and the writer was secondary slave, we got the following part of the output:

/dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdc



/dev/cdrom1 ->/dev/hdd

Hence, the file for the CD Writer is /dev/cdrom1. Similarly, find the file name in your case. Then in fstab file remove ‘kudzu’ from the line for that file (as we did above for /dev/cdrom). Note down the mount point and issue:



ln -sf /dev/scd0

Restart the machine. Henceforth, the CD in the writer will be mounted to the mount point you noted down from

fstab.

CD writer application



We use a GUI KDE application for this. Install the RPM named koncd-0.9.2-1.i386.rpm from this month’s CD in the directory cdrom/linux/koncd. If you get an error related to libz.so.1, use ‘–nodeps’ suffix. Start X Window and from within a terminal window, issue ‘koncd’. The GUI for KOnCD will pop up. Click Tools>Setup. Select your CD ROM drive and CD writer from the drop down list for reader and writer. Click Tools>Image type and select the type of image from the drop down list–most probably ‘Win9x/NT (long filenames)’.

Burning data CDs



Click on ‘Master CD’ button. Click on the ‘Source-Dirs’ tab and add the directories using the button below. In the ‘Image’ tab you can select ‘Burn on-the-fly’ option to burn the CD without creating an image file. Otherwise enter ‘/tmp/cd.iso’ for the ‘Image-File’ name. Select the writing speed in the ‘CD-Writer’ section and then click on Start.

Burning audio CDs



Install mpg123-0.59r-10.i386.rpm found in the RedHat/RPMS directory of PCQLinux CD 1 (July 2001). Click on the Audio CD button in the main Window of KOnCD. Click on ‘Add track’ to select WAV or MP3 files to burn. Select ‘Track at once’ and ‘Use padding’ options. Click on start to burn the audio CD.