A few weeks back I posted to this list with a problem burning CDs. Several people made intelligent suggestions, none of which worked. I have now got the problem sorted out and thought I'd report out in an effort to help others who might find themselves in the same boat. I installed Fedora Core 1 on an Athlon 950 with 512 megs of RAM and a nice new LG cd/dvd reader burner. This is the only CD device. Hardware detection worked ok, apparently. The installer found the internet connection (to a router to ADSL) automagically, which made me very happy, the floppy diskette drive works (don't laugh, I've had it fail in some installs) and the apps, if a little scant, worked ok. The problem I found was that the CD burning programs SEEMED to work, went through all the motions, the red light on the burner blinked for plausible lengths of time but not a byte was written. Not coasters, either, just blank CDs. The /etc/fstab file was: LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1 LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 /dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0 As far as i can tell, this is the FC1 default for my hardware. The problem lies on the last line where it says "owner,kudzu,ro." "ro" is read-only. "rw" is read-write. When I changed the text to say "rw" the burning process started to work. I think it is incredibly dumb-ass to successfully detect a CD burner at the hardware detection stage and then mount it by default so that it can not burn CDs. dumb, dumb, dumb. sack of hammers dumb. Microsoft dumb. I am of course pissed off all the more because it took me weeks of intermittent effort to sort this out. Lost time and a sneaking suspicion that a more astute user might have picked up on it right away (none on this list did). While I'm venting I might as well rant about the lack of support for mp3's too. I successfully updated xmms only to find that this apparently introduced circular dependencies in the rpms to implement ESR's multimedia updates. Ducky, just ducky. And now "yum update" stalls out because of circular dependencies and updates have come to a halt. What does this say about the robustness of yum? Is it just me? It isn't smart to put out a distro that doesn't address common denominator needs and desires or that fails to implement obvious functionality in hardware correctly detected. Now that the CD burner works I can back up my files and risk a reinstall. Does anyone have experience updating to FC2 with respect to these issues? I'm curious about kernel 2.6. Dave -- Patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings
