DVD burner ...

[castra]

Hi guys

I'm going to buy a dvd +- RW burner in near future and wondering
what software do I have to install to use it with Gentoo 1.4.
What must be done so that system can see dvd burner?
Does anyone uses DVD RW with linux in general ?
Need some input about this issue !

Thanks

[NeddySeagoon]

castra,

This page is a good place to start reading http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/

The 2.4.20-gentoo-r5 has both the Packet CD and DVD+RW patches in so you can do drag and drop to CDs or DVDs. (You need to configue the kernel properly of course) There is a problem with writing files this way which are larger than physical memory. Becasue the CD/DVD is slow, memory fills up with buffers waiting to be written. This is supposed to be fixed in the 2.6 kernel but I haven't tested it yet.

If you are happy with growisofs then you can write iso filesystems on DVD. I chose DVD+RW/R because it supports proper random access, so you can have any filesystem you want on you DVDs. UDF, the filesystem used on DVDs works OK with the exception for large files I've already noted.

If you want to write DVD video for use in DVD palyers, well thats a whole new set of problems that I haven't started to get to grips with yet.

Regards,

NeddySeagoon
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.