> Anyway, CD-RW's are not the same kind of CD hardware in that they 'read'
> somewhat differently. In some instances they won't read regular data CD's
> because of the formatting. An example of this is a re-writable CD is a
> data CD that can only be read by the CD-RW that wrote the CD. A regular
> CDROM will not be able to read that format. I think this quirk goes both
> ways, although I could be mistaken.
Mark, this may be true with Linux though as I haven't figured out
Gtoaster but what you're saying is simply not the case when these
drives/disks are used in a Windows environment. I regularly read CD-RW
disks with my standard CD-ROMs. The difference is that in Windows
there's readily available software to handle this (eg - Direct CD). No
problem reading standard CDs with the writer either.
My biggest frustration with Linux is its lack of maturity in situations
like this. Not really the fault of the Linux proper as the OS sees and
mounts the hardware just peachy. What's lacking are the peripheral
softwares and auto-install programming to allow this stuff to happen
without spending many hours hunting down solutions and hoping that they
work. If the distribution producers would spend their time addressing
these things (and I know they are to a certain extent) as they do
scraping together a pile of arcade games to include in the distribution,
we'd all be better off.
Since this will likely generate comment, let's talk specifics. This
weekend I added a Sony CRX140ECS to my system. After hooking up the
drive I:
Windows (5 minutes required):
1) Booted the system.
This recognized the drive and stuck an icon on the desktop for me. The
drive was usable as a reader.
2) I stuck in the Adaptec CD when it was finished I rebooted.
This set things up for both CD-R and CD-RW disks and allows my
52x CD-ROM to read the CD-RW disks.
Linux (have spent 2h thus far):
1) Drive was recognized by Linux on boot.
2) Had to add stuff to fstab.
Ah...the drive is mounted and is usable.
3) Went running around the web in an attempt to find out why none of the
CD writer software would recognize it. Read about SCSI
kludge...followed the implementation.
4) Still trying to figure out how to get Gtoaster to talk to the drive,
deal with permissions, etc. Still can't write to the drive.
Seems to me that there's just got to be a better way. I sometimes think
that what would advance the cause of Linux more than anything would be
some "installer" packages, some for hardware and some for software, that
would push through some of this stuff. One such package that comes to
mind is the Roaring Penguin ADSL app/install package which works like a
charm.
Cheers --- Larry
