duncan brown wrote: > for posterity, i'm going to paste in the cdrecording faq/howto i've been > working on into this email. hopefully it'll help it get some > distribution. > > there's still more work i want to do on it, but here you go: Looks good. But I have a few notes... ---- Linux can use the Microsoft Joliet extensions for long filenames if Rock Ridge isn't present. Burning a CD is changing. With kernel 2.6, you don't need to use SCSI emulation, you can just use cdrecord dev=/dev/cdrw driveropts=burnfree image.iso where cdrw is your IDE drive (hdc, for example). This will give you a warning that it isn't supported. That's cdrecord's author's opinion: there's a disagreement between him and the Linux kernel developers about what "portable" and "user-friendly" mean... According to man cdrecord, you want driveropts=burnfree to turn on any buffer underrun prevention (Just Link, Burn Proof, etc.) This should cut down on the number of coasters you make. You can pipe the output of mkisofs into cdrecord, if you aren't doing any heavy processing on it (e.g. compression). This saves having to store an ISO image on disk. For example, this comes from my backup script: # OK: now write it to CD mkisofs -lRJV"`date +%d%m%y` backup" $BACKUPDIR | cdrecord dev=$DEVICE\ driveropts=burnfree blank=fast - ($BACKUPDIR is a temporary directory full of .tar.gz of files I can't easily recreate...) You may want to nice --18 mkisofs to give it more of a chance to create the ISO image. > ok, let's pretend it's being really ill tempered. let's try one last tactic > before throwing away the disc and adding to the waste dumps. Given that your FAQ is aimed at newbies, you might want to point out that this disc should never again be trusted (e.g. for backups). Hope this helps, James. -- E-mail address: james@ | It is difficult to produce a television documentary westexe.demon.co.uk | that is both incisive and probing when every twelve | minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits | singing about toilet paper. -- R. Serling