[plug] Debian support for newest CD Writers

[Trevor Phillips]

Beau Kuiper wrote:

> On Friday 28 December 2001 18:12, Harry McNally wrote:
> 
>>I'm looking at CD Writers at http://www.austin.net.au and reviews in
>>http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/01q4/011213/index.html and Linux
>>compatibility at http://wt.xpilot.org/cgi-bin/winni/lsc.pl
>>
>>Has anyone bought a recent CD Writer and set it up under Debian Woody ?


Yep!! I did a bit of research (read reviews, etc...) and it came down to 
an LG drive (16/10/40) and a Yamaha drive (24/10/40??). Although the 
Yamaha was overly swanky (gotta love variable-rate burns - not gear 
changing, but smooth altering of burn speed!), I settled for the LG 
drive, at about $180.

I've been very impressed with this drive! Built-in burn protection (no 
software tweaks needed), good support for different modes, etc, etc... 
Runs very quietly, too (esp compared to my Pioneer DVD-ROM ^_^;;).

I haven't tried copying fancy copy-protected stuff, but from what I 
read, it has the capabilities required to do so.

I use gcombust for most of my burning (creating from content, not 
duping). Anyone have any other recommendations for feature-filled GUI 
burners?


>>Am I right in thinking the emulated SCSI commands haven't changed and it
>>should kick into life anyway ?


Yep! Once I got the Fake SCSI stuff working, everything worked first go.


>>Any other monumentous (cavernous ?) pitfalls with these gadgets ?


Don't burn at 8x from content over a 10Mbit network. ^_^;;
It was an interesting experiment, actually, sitting there watching the 
buffer slowly empty, not quite keeping up. Interestingly, the burn died 
at about 400Mb, had thousands of FIFO being empty errors - but the disk 
looked like only 400Mb had been written (looking at the physical etched 
part), and the content that WAS written was readable with no errors or 
speed/seek problems. Only mystery is why did it stop? Perhaps the 
software gave up after all the errors...


> The only downfalls are:
> 
> 1) The drive gets awfully confused if you cancel a cd burn using control-C, 
> requiring a reboot.


I had the same problem, so I suspect it's a driver issue, rather than 
the drive itself? (Luckily, I was doing it with a CD-RW burn. ^_^)


> 2) You need to eject the disk after a simulated write to make the drive work 
> correctly.


Not sure if mine is the same - I rarely bother with sim writes, and the 
burner seems to auto-eject to reinitialise itself as needed.


> There is a more detailed review of the Ricoh on www.cdrinfo.com
 
I found http://www.cdrlabs.com/ to have really informative reviews on different drives.



-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ .
: CWIS Systems Administrator     -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au :
| IT Services                       -               Murdoch University |
  >--------------------------------------------------------------------<
| On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of     /
| course. But mostly evil, on the whole.                             /
  \      -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)                          /