Chapter 18. Remote CD Burning

Difficult-o-Meter: 2 (light Linux skill required)

Covers:

cdrecord	http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/ employees /joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html
mkisofs	http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/mkisofs.html
xcdroast	http://www.xcdroast.org
CD-Writing HOWTO	http://www. ibiblio .org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO

Question: How do I burn CD-Rs on my Linux machine? Where do I start?

Answer: In the summer of '00 I was right where you were at. I couldn't find an exact document that would teach me how to do what I wanted to do ”which was throw an IDE ^[*] CD-RW in a P133 I had sitting around and then burn CDs unattended. Thus this chapter was born.

^[*] Integrated Device Electronics, as opposed to SCSI.

I'd had the remote-burn approach in mind when I bought my Mitsumi CDRW drive. I'd made sure it was listed in the CD-Writing-HOWTO as one that was supported (the HOWTO is at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO ).

You might want to check and make sure yours is supported. It likely is. When I got my Mitsumi CR-4802TE, it was not listed as 100 percent supported, but there were hints from people that it was, so I gambled.

It's really up to you whether you want your CD recording device (hereafter referred to as a burner ) in your workstation or in some other machine. I'm paranoid and work under the assumption that even hitting the Shift key while burning a CD-R will result in a failed burn (and this is obviously not true), so I put it in a machine that doesn't do much else. When I want to burn a CD, I SSH into the burning station ("Surt"), transfer the files, create the iso image, and cut the CD. The only CPU- intensive process that runs on that machine is the burning software itself ”even though CD-Rs are less than $1 each these days, I still hate to waste them. When you're picking the machine you're going to put the burner in, don't forget disk space. If you're going to cut full 650MB CD-Rs, you're going to need 2 x 650MB, or 1.3GB of free space. Why that much? Because we don't cut CDs on the fly ”that's a good way to waste blanks. So we need 650MB for the files that will be on the CD and another 650MB for the .iso image we'll create from those files: 650 x 650 = 1300.

Now that you've found almost 1.5 gigabytes of free space, and made sure it's in the proper machine, you get to install your burner. If you've got a small computer systems interface (SCSI) burner well, you're obviously either a genuine power user , a hardware snob, or both, so skip ahead to where I'm talking about installing the requisite software.