“The CD-Writing HOWTO at http://www.guug.de/~winni/linux/and the
official cdrecord site at
www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html
offer a great deal of information about installing and using CD-ROM
writers. Certainly much more than you need to know for an ordinary
Linux installation. If you don’t want to support an obsolete
drive, or an older kernel, or VAX VMS, then you probably don’t need
to recompile the kernel or make any devices. This short document
should be sufficient to get you started burning disks. Once you are
started, the official documents will guide you to such esoterica as
audio, bootable, multisession and hybrid disks. After
determining that RedHat 6.1 was so easy, I tried setting up several
other distributions, including RedHat 6.0, SUSE 6.1, Debian 2.1,
and Storm 2000. All of those were slightly harder because they
didn’t include a recent version of cdrecord but none required a
kernel rebuild, I have noted the differences along the way.”
“I believe any drives you bought in a store recently will
qualify. The cdrecord docs say that all 1999 or later ATAPI drives
support MMC, which is sufficient. Many earlier drives are suppoted
also. A look on the shelves at the local computer superstore did
not turn up any that mentioned MMC or Linux on the box. My first
installation used an older Richoh MP6200A cd recorder. I did more
installations with the MagicWriter 4X4X24. This is a very cheap
drive, but the manual had a 1999 copyright date and it did work as
I expected.”
“Perform the physical installation of the new drive just as you
would any ide drive. It can replace your original read-only drive
or be added on. Make sure the drive jumper is set for master or
slave as required, the power cable is connected and the data cable
has the correct orientation. You shouldn’t have to do any CMOS
setup. I am told that keeping the cd-writer on a different cable
from the hard drive speeds data transfers, but this is probably not
significant with Pentium class machines.”