(Why? They understand this kind of thing. Mind you, I am not a fan of theirs anymore, and their execution -- appropriate word at times! -- of things sometimes 'sucks' rather badly, and I *really* do not like where they have started going lately, but the fact remains, they understand that things the user does have to work, right, and -- at least semi- -- consistently.)
OTOH, most of Linux *is* written for free, so I can at least partly understand why it is happening. Once I resolve this last (gentoo?) Win4Lin-vs ATI-dual-monitor thing, I will be using Linux as my primary O/S, at which point I already kinow that I am going to have to get my hands dirty all the way up to my ankles fixing things that annoy me, and I will probably send these back to the maintainers for general inclusion. I'm sure others do this too, at least those that can!, but that leaves some things undone. CD-burning should most certainly _not_ be one of those things!, so the question is, why is cd-burning broke so much of the time?
(Oh!, and uniq seems to be broke too... it apparently ignores the 'skip-x-first-chars-on-line thing, which I need right now to help another user here... Sigh...)
Just my penny-plus-tax-worth. rgh.
William Kenworthy wrote:
I am not talking about coasters, but the scsi emulation loops one has to jump through, long howtos that are so generic they leave the average user groping in the dark. Kernel devs having arguments with the developer of the main cd burning tool and not sitting down and mapping a way forward so the user is left having to burn as root, or using patches designed to bypass the problem. Some ways to address a burner used DMA, some dont allow it. Some systems can use /dev/hdX, some require magick in the form of /dev/cdroms/cdrom0, others as ATAPI:0,0,0 but not all are equal and not all will work depending on kernel and software versions.
Then if you sort it out and finally get burning again, you upgrade the kernel and find it doesnt work, so you start again ...
Then there's the software itself - I used to like gcombust, simple reliable and it worked - then it couldnt deal with the non-scsi stuff. Then I found nautilus-cd-burner - great for the quick job. The kernel mess cured me of that (I will go back to it when it starts working again). I have now settled on k3b, but I wonder how long that will keep working ...
This is worse on gentoo than systems like Mandrake and redhat because their philosophy allows them to modify the upstream software for their users in ways that are difficult for gentoo to do (i.e., patch around the kernel nonsense which I presume they have done because CD burning just seems to work for them. I setup my first burner in the Mandrake 6 days - that was a nightmare! They now simplify things for their users - I am not saying gentoo should go this route, but cd-burning has far to much black magic involved at the moment.
Sorry if I sound a bit bitter, but this is a real pain for the average user (gentoo or otherwise). And dont say if you tweak this and tune that it will work, thats bunk, of course I do that I do that, and it will work, but not for long. Its fixing the whole CD burning mess thats needed.
BillK
On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 10:31 +0200, Harald Arnesen wrote:
"W.Kenworthy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
CD burning and linux is just not "nice" in all the years I have usedI have over the years burned thousands of CDs, and got about a handful
linux - and it seems to be getting worse, not better.
of "coasters". Are you sure you use good quality discs and a decent
burner (Plextor, maybe some others)?
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