As the title says, this howto will help you using your DVD burner under Debian Linux. In fact, the howto should also work for other distributions, too. I for my part have a cheap LiteOn burning device, but again, it shouldn't mather if you want to use a different one.
Requirements
Before using your DVD burning device, make sure that your Linux installation knows about it. dmesg should
show you some output similar to this one:
hdh: LITE-ON DVDRW SOHW-832S, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
That line just means that my DVD burner is accessible via the /dev/hdh device name.
If no DVD burning device shows up in dmesg's output, you probably need to load the ide-cd module manually. Execute
lsmod to find out if ide-cd is already loaded. If not, do so by executing (as root, of course)
modprobe ide-cd
On the software side, we need the following packages (your distro probably already installed all or some of them):
- dvd+rwtools (>= 5.12.x)
- dvdrtools
When using Debian, you would just call apt-get install to install the required packages.
After installing any necessary software, make sure that the following commands are available:
- mkisofs
- growisofs
growisofs --help prints strange special characters to the console. There's something wrong with growisofs if that occurs to you and DVD burning will probably not work. Make sure you apt-get update and apt-get upgrade to the newest growisofs version.
Burn that thing!
Well, the easiest thing is to put all the files you want to burn into a separate directory. Having done so, insert a blank DVD into your device and start burning by
growisofs -Z /dev/hdh -R -J /path/to/burndir
Of course you have to replace hdh with your device name, as shown in dmesg's output (see above). If you do not like the command line, K3B is an excellent CD and DVD burning tool for KDE. A screenshot is shown below.
hardsoda361 wrote, on November 5, 2007 at 2:52 a.m.:
Nice page greetings to all in this guestbook!