Well, guys, after about 4 weeks of monkeying around, I finally got Xcdroast to work on my Mandrake 8.2 system. I've burned some CDs and they seem to work fine. Hooray!
Here is my story of unbelievable frustration and eventual triumph. As you might recall, if you were there, I brought my computer in to the last clinic at Emerald Park with hopes of upgrading to Mandrake 8.2 from the 8.1 version I had installed. Jamie brought a set of the latest Mandrake CDs and was kind enough to let me copy them. I was eager to check out the latest version so I wiped my hard disk and installed Mandrake 8.2. After the install, which went fine, I wanted to copy the ISO images to my hard drive so that I could burn my own set of CDs later. Unfortunately, no one could figure out how to get either of the three GUI CD burning programs that came with Mandrake to work. Of the three, I liked the look and feel of Xcdroast the best and endeavored to figure it out. That night after the meeting I stayed up late doing research and much reading about configuring CD writers and using Xcdroast. The problem was that Xcdroast would not recognize the presence of a CD in either of my CD drives (one is a reader and one a writer). After lots of reconfiguring of drive settings with no success, I gave up, and thinking that I had probably messed things hopelessly up, I reinstalled Mandrake version 8.2 from scratch. (Thanks again to Jamie for making me a copy of the CD set.) It still didn't work though. So then I tried reinstalling Mandrake version 8.1, and low and behold, Xcdroast worked! It recognized my CD writer but not my reader. After about a week of trying to make sense of this I chanced upon a cached web page at Google (the original page no longer existed) which clearly explained the problem. Here it is: XCDROAST News: (last updated: 08 April 2002) Information for Mandrake 8.2 users: Mandrake 8.2 ships with a broken version of X-CD-Roast! They patched it to use the cdrtools-1.11a15 which is NOT compatible with X-CD-Roast 0.98alpha9! Please write them and complain about shipping untested software and not even asking me for assistance. Quick fix (until I release alpha10) is to update the cdrtools at least to version 1.11a19 - You can get it from the development tree of Mandrake (cooker). Start X-CD-Roast with "xcdroast -n" to let it pass the version check. (Example download link: Get the cdrecord-* packages.) With this clue in hand, I searched the Mandrake site and found this security bulletin which acknowledged the problem and offered a fix: http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/advisories/2002/MDKA-2002-004-1.php My troubles then shifted to getting MandrakeUpdate to work! First, I had no idea where to go to download the updates. When I did what the MandrakeUpdate instructions said, I got no list of bugfix sources to choose from. After days of trying to figure out how MandrakeUpdate worked and if I had to pay to get access to these system updates, I stumbled across the fact the "bugfix" updates were actually listed under "security" updates in the drop-down menu of available sources. Progress! Having found a valid source for bugfix updates, I could now select packages for download and installation. Unfortunately, whenever I tried this my KDE session would lock up and I'd have to kill everything and reboot in order to get the mouse, Mandrake's SoftwareManager program, and my internet connection working again. After a few days of trying to figure this out, I changed my dialup PAP/CHAP settings and tried downloading updates at different times of day. Eventually I found some combination that worked and I got the Mandrake Xcdroast bugfix updates installed! Another minor hurdle cleared. Unfortunately, the new version of Xcdroast still did not see my CDs; although, it did recognize both of my CD drives. The way I got this to work was another whole-week-long adventure. Results: Here is what you have to do to get Xcdroast to see a CD reader on your system as well as the CD writer which Mandrake automatically sets up for you if it's there when you do the system installation. The trick is that both CD drives must use SCSI emulation. The IDE CD reader must have this turned on manually. These are the lines that need to be added or changed in the following list of files: /etc/lilo.conf append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi" Note: Use whichever of the following device names are appropriate for where you have your CD reader and writer attached. hda = IDE bus/connector 0 master device hdb = IDE bus/connector 0 slave device hdc = IDE bus/connector 1 master device hdd = IDE bus/connector 1 slave device Note 2: Be sure to run lilo -v after making changes to update your boot settings. /etc/modules scsi_hostadapter /etc/modules.conf probeall scsi_hostadapter ide-scsi options ide-cd ignore='hdc hdd' /etc/fstab /mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/cdroms/cdrom0,fs=iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0 /mnt/cdwriter /mnt/cdwriter supermount dev=/dev/cdroms/cdrom1,fs=iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0 Mandrake 8.2 uses the devfs (device filesystem) which automatically detects hardware at startup and creates the appropriate device files in a set of folders at "/dev". Your CD drives will show up in "/dev/cdroms" as SCSI devices cdrom0 and cdrom1. The hard part about figuring this stuff out was that most of the documentation I found online was out of date and referred to older ways of doing things that were inappropriate for Mandrake 8.2. It took me a couple of days of reading about and experimenting with both manual device files and devfs (which I think is really cool) before all the arcane instructions I was following made any sense. Having explained how to get SCSI emulation to work (which is necessary for Xcdroast to see your CD drives) I will now get back to my main story of getting Xcdroast to see the CDs you put in you CD drives. As I said before, the update Mandrake provides does not work. I think the reason for this is that you have to update other packages as well; the Xcdroast site mentions that you need a newer version of "cdrtools" but the Mandrake update does not appear to include this. Their online documentation and tech support has not impressed me. Even when I paid for it I got lots of run around and few helpful answers. But I can't say Debian support is any better. Eventually I gave up on MandrakeUpdate and just downloaded the latest version of Xcdroast and supporting libraries from the Xcdroast directory at Sourceforge. Here is a link to the RPMs: http://xcdroast.sourceforge.net/RPMS/a10/mandrake-8.2/ There are 5 files and I downloaded and installed all of them. The cdrecord-devel* package would not install so I just ignored it; I think it might be developer info which is not needed for Xcdroast to work. This is a newer version than shipped with Mandrake and it supposedly has many wonderful new features. I don't see much difference except that it actually works! And that's all I really care about right now. As I said at the beginning, I'm happy to be able to burn CDs now without having to resort to Windows. The motivating force which kept me going through all this frustration was my love of free software and determination to never-again buy proprietary, immoral, closed source, human creativity destroying, anti-social, greed-motivated, and exploitation-seeking software. For me, "religion" is the only reason to do anything. Dexter Graphic <<< >>> <<< >>> <<< >>> <<< >>> <<< >>> <<< >>> <<< >>> Never be afraid to follow truth, beauty, and goodness wherever they may lead you. www.UniversalFamilyLove.net <<< >>> <<< >>> <<< >>> <<< >>> <<< >>> <<< >>> <<< >>>
