mkisofs, cdda2wav, cdrecord

mkisofs , cdda2wav, cdrecord

Check out the links at the opening of this chapter for where to download mkisofs. This is the first tool we'll install, because without it we won't get anywhere . mkisofs will create an iso9660 file system (isofs, get it?) ”the standard format of CD-ROMs everywhere. Most PC CD-ROMs have Joliet extensions too, but ISO9660 came first. Basically, mkisofs takes a directory structure and turns it into one big iso image. Then cdrecord will throw that iso image onto a recordable CD.

Building mkisofs is easier than you'd think, and it also ends up building most everything else you need to write CDs. Basically, head to the FTP directory referred to earlier and grab the latest stable version of cdrtools ”that'll contain cdrecord, mkisofs, and all the other goodies . (Be sure to grab the latest stable version. I had difficulty getting the experimental versions to work on my system.)

Building the whole works is a little different than one's average package. This is probably due to the fact that the author (Mr. Schilling) has made a genuinely multiplatform release here. It compiles and runs on most everything. I've saved you a little work, since I went through the READMEs and promptly decided that they were wrong. They ordered me to unset some variables in SuSE Linux and to run a special command. Well, SuSE didn't have that variable defined, so I guessed that the documentation was out of date (it certainly appears to be). All I had to do to get the system to build was to change into the directory, type make, and then follow that up with a make install ”but don't run the make install until after you've read the next paragraph!

The make doesn't take that long, but it defaults to installing the binaries in /opt/schily/bin ”which isn't really a typical Linux way of doing it. /usr/local seems like a better place for this stuff, but no matter how I tried, I could only get it to run from /usr/bin ! I played with three versions of the software (1.8, 1.9, and 1.10a4), all compiled from source, and one installed via RPM. For no good reason, the cdrecord binary refused to run from any location other than /usr/bin. I even tried putting a soft link in /usr/bin to the real location, and it didn't work. I don't understand why this is, but it's consistent. I'm chalking it up to some kind of hardcoding in the cdrecord code.

cd DEFAULTS

edit Defaults.linux

change all instances of /opt/schily to /usr

NOW run the 'make install' :)

The next little thing I do is to introduce a security hole in my system. setuid programs are to be avoided whenever possible, but sometimes they save a lot of nuisance. I usually put the setuid bit on cdrecord ”because one has to be root in order to access the CD burner . I'm the only user on my burning station, so the security risk is quite small. I wouldn't dream of doing this on a shared machine ”in that case I'd use a nifty little utility called sudo (see Chapter 15 ).

Okay, so now we've got cdrecord and mkisofs installed on the system. Whatever do we do with them? We make CDs, of course!