Creating ISO images in a CDRWless laptop

[James Wilkinson]

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.

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