Burning CDs

[Phil Bass]

Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 17:42 +0000, Phil Bass wrote:
>   
>> For the record, I managed to get xcdroast to work by manually
>> specifying the device names (/dev/scd0 for my CD ROM drive
>> and /dev/scd1 for my CD writer). Specifying the device in SCSI form
>> 'dev=0,1,0' causes cdrecord to report:
>>
>> WARNING: the deprecated pseudo SCSI syntax found as device
>> specification. 
>>     
> I'm curious whether you got the wrong device configuration from a fresh
> install, or an upgrade install.  Generally, I've seen burning software
> get the right devices if they're from a clean install and they've worked
> out the device to use for themselves.  But an update install could
> easily try to use a prior configuration, that's using the older scheme.
>   
Sorry to take so long to reply to this.

I'm not sure what you mean by an upgrade install, but the here's what I 
think I did:

 1. Installed Fedora 7 from scratch (or possibly upgraded from an 
earlier version).
 2. Subsequently installed xcdroast. No problem; auto-detects CD-ROM and 
CD-writer, works fine.
 3. Over many months periodically applied Fedora updates. I don't 
remember any xcdroast updates.

Having discovered that xcdroast no longer worked I then started looking 
for information about my problem. I found that a Fedora update stopped 
xcdroast working unless run as root. But running it as root didn't work; 
it just changed the device names in the list of devices. The fundamental 
problem was that xcdroast had detected my CD devices, but wasn't able to 
use them. Furthermore xcdroast locked up when told to scan for devices, 
so I was stuck.

The whole topic of device names is very confusing. At the time there 
seemed to be a choice of three naming conventions: SCSI, ATA and ATAPI, 
and I couldn't find definitive information on which of those to use. As 
it turns out the device names that work don't follow any of those. (It's 
nice to see proper Unix device names for a change, though. ;-) )

So AFAICS, I had a perfectly good configuration; it just stopped working!
> I think burning software should only bother to ask you to pick the
> burner if you've got more than one to choose from.  Otherwise, the
> computer should find the optical drives, itself, and work out which
> one's a burner from the drive's identification data.  It's the computer,
> not you, let it do the computing work.
>   
Yes, that would be nice.

-- 
Phil Bass (phil at stoneymanor.demon.co.uk)