[H-GEN] Re: E-Smith CD

[Paul Gearon]

Tony Bilbrough wrote:

> I am seriously thinking of getting a dvd burner tomorrow, because the 
> downloads are now impractical  with our slow downloads.
> - any suggestions?
> It must work under Debian [Sarge], naturally.
> cheers Tony

For burning purposes I'd recommend the LG GSA-4081B.  Not sure who else stocks
them, but UMart sell them for $155.  I use it with my Debian box.

It does +R +RW -R -RW and DVD-RAM.  The first 4 formats (+-) are both
supported by cdrecord, though I use cdrecord-ProDVD as it's better for DVDs
(not completely open source, but free for non-commercial use).

If you want to play with your kernel, then you can also add the "packet"
kernel patches to use the +RW format as a re-writable ext3 filesystem.
Personally, I haven't bothered with this, as I just use the DVD-RAM.

With a stock standard system you can just put in a $5 DVD-RAM disc, type
"mke2fs /dev/hdc; mount /dev/hdc /mnt/dvd -t ext2", and voila!  You have a
filesystem you can read and write to.  This is the reason I went with a drive
that is DVD-RAM compatible.  At $5 they cost a little more than a DVD+RW, but
I get complete compatibility with what is effectively a 4.7GB floppy disc.  :-)

The downside with this drive is that the linux kernel appears to be unable to
read the second layer of a video DVD.  Windoze can read the second layer just
fine, but the Linux kernel start spouting I/O errors on any second layer
sectors.  It's annoying, but for now I'm just using my old DVD reader on
/dev/hdd.  Of course this has no effect on burning, as all writable discs are
currently single layer only.

-- 
Regards,
Paul Gearon

Software Engineer                Telephone:   +61 7 3876 2188
Tucana Technologies              Fax:         +61 7 3876 4899
                                  http://www.tucanatech.com

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