cd writing problems - solution found!

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To: fedora-list@redhat.com
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 12:52:55 -0800

A few weeks back I posted to this list with a problem burning CDs. Several
people made intelligent suggestions, none of which worked. I have now got the
problem sorted out and thought I'd report out in an effort to help others who
might find themselves in the same boat.

I installed Fedora Core 1 on an Athlon 950 with 512 megs of RAM and a nice new
LG cd/dvd reader burner. This is the only CD device. Hardware detection
worked ok, apparently. The installer found the internet connection (to a
router to ADSL) automagically, which made me very happy, the floppy diskette
drive works (don't laugh, I've had it fail in some installs) and the apps, if
a little scant, worked ok.

The problem I found was that the CD burning programs SEEMED to work, went
through all the motions, the red light on the burner blinked for plausible
lengths of time but not a byte was written. Not coasters, either, just blank
CDs.

The /etc/fstab file was:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

As far as i can tell, this is the FC1 default for my hardware. The problem
lies on the last line where it says "owner,kudzu,ro." "ro" is read-only. "rw"
is read-write. When I changed the text to say "rw" the burning process
started to work.

I think it is incredibly dumb-ass to successfully detect a CD burner at the
hardware detection stage and then mount it by default so that it can not burn
CDs. dumb, dumb, dumb. sack of hammers dumb. Microsoft dumb. I am of course
pissed off all the more because it took me weeks of intermittent effort to
sort this out. Lost time and a sneaking suspicion that a more astute user
might have picked up on it right away (none on this list did).

While I'm venting I might as well rant about the lack of support for mp3's
too. I successfully updated xmms only to find that this apparently introduced
circular dependencies in the rpms to implement ESR's multimedia updates.
Ducky, just ducky. And now "yum update" stalls out because of circular
dependencies and updates have come to a halt. What does this say about the
robustness of yum? Is it just me?

It isn't smart to put out a distro that doesn't address common denominator
needs and desires or that fails to implement obvious functionality in
hardware correctly detected.

Now that the CD burner works I can back up my files and risk a reinstall. Does
anyone have experience updating to FC2 with respect to these issues? I'm
curious about kernel 2.6.

Dave

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• Previous message: Patrick Nelson: "Re: SCSI needs"
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• Reply: -=Brian Truter=-: "RE: cd writing problems - solution found!"
• Reply: Jeff Vian: "Re: cd writing problems - solution found!"
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