[H-GEN] CD Burner software

[Christopher Biggs]

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David Munn <djmunn at bigpond.com> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> I have scored a LITE-ON  CD-RW  burner with a E-IDE ATAPI interface......of 
> course it came with software for that other o/s that crashes.......
> I have tried to use Gnome Toaster but the  cdrecord program says its looking 
> for a scsi driver .......

Almost all the drag-and-drool cd-burning software packages are just
front-ends to two command-line CD tools, cdrecord and cdrdao.
Personally, I find the front-ends of little value.

> Does anyone know of drivers for the above hardware or ones that will
> work with a E-IDE burner......  

ATAPI (ATA Packet Interface) is a method of talking to devices other
than fixed disks (eg cd-readers/writers, tape drives, floppy drives)
by sending SCSI command packets over the ATA bus.  It's a creditable
re-use of the SCSI device-control standards, rather than re-inventing
the wheel.

You need to either turn on your Linux kernel's "SCSI emulation" (which
allows ATAPI devices to appear as vanilla SCSI devices), or obtain a
sufficiently recent version of "cdrecord" which implments its own
support for ATAPI SCSI encapsulation.

In either case, there's a quite good description of what you'll need
to do in the "README.ATAPI" file in the cdrecord source.   You
probably already have that file in /usr/share/doc/cdrecord-<version>.

(Hint:  "cdrecord -scanbus", also "cdrecord dev=ATAPI -scanbus")

> Im running RED HAT 8 on a Pentium 200.....
                            ^^^^^^^^^^^

In which case you will want to eschew glitzy cpu-hogging frontends in
favour of devoting as much cpu power as you have to feeding data to
the drive, especially if you expect to burn at high-speeds (say 8x or
above).

--cjb


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