Burning Data CDs

---

Burning data CDs in GNOME has become extremely easy since the appearance of the Nautilus CD Creator in Red Hat Linux It is one of the many reasons I prefer GNOME to KDE. To burn a data CD, just place a blank CD-R (CD-Recordable) disk in your drive, and an empty Nautilus CD Creator window will open (see Figure 7-4).

Figure 7-4: An empty Nautilus CD Creator window

After that, things are just as simple. Drag all of the files you want to burn to CD to the CD Creator window. Remember that once you’ve written those files to a CD-R disk, the files are there to stay; you cannot add or remove files from that disk later, so make sure you’ve got everything you want to burn ready to go before you commit. Once your list of files is complete, click the Write to CD button.

The window shown in Figure 7-5 will then appear, telling you how many megabytes of files you have selected to write to CD. In this window, you can adjust the write speed and give your CD a title; you can also just accept the defaults that CD Creator automatically selected. You should uncheck the Reuse these files for another CD checkbox unless you are planning to burn more than one CD of the same data.

Figure 7-5: Setting options before writing a CD

Once you are ready to burn the CD, just click the Write files to CD button, and CD Creator will do its work. When it is done burning your CD, it will even automatically eject it for you. Very, very simple. And yes, the CDs you create in Linux will be readable in other operating systems.

---