cd writing problems - solution found!

[Dave Stevens]

A few weeks back I posted to this list with a problem burning CDs. Several 
people made intelligent suggestions, none of which worked. I have now got the 
problem sorted out and thought I'd report out in an effort to help others who 
might find themselves in the same boat.

I installed Fedora Core 1 on an Athlon 950 with 512 megs of RAM and a nice new 
LG cd/dvd reader burner. This is the only CD device. Hardware detection 
worked ok, apparently. The installer found the internet connection (to a 
router to ADSL) automagically, which made me very happy, the floppy diskette 
drive works (don't laugh, I've had it fail in some installs) and the apps, if 
a little scant, worked ok.

The problem I found was that the CD burning programs SEEMED to work, went 
through all the motions, the red light on the burner blinked for plausible 
lengths of time but not a byte was written. Not coasters, either, just blank 
CDs.

The /etc/fstab file was:

LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
/dev/hda3               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             auto    noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              udf,iso9660 
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

As far as i can tell, this is the FC1 default for my hardware. The problem 
lies on the last line where it says "owner,kudzu,ro." "ro" is read-only. "rw" 
is read-write. When I changed the text to say "rw" the burning process 
started to work.

I think it is incredibly dumb-ass to successfully detect a CD burner at the 
hardware detection stage and then mount it by default so that it can not burn 
CDs. dumb, dumb, dumb. sack of hammers dumb. Microsoft dumb. I am of course 
pissed off all the more because it took me weeks of intermittent effort to 
sort this out. Lost time and a sneaking suspicion that a more astute user 
might have picked up on it right away (none on this list did).

While I'm venting I might as well rant about the lack of support for mp3's 
too. I successfully updated xmms only to find that this apparently introduced 
circular dependencies in the rpms to implement ESR's multimedia updates. 
Ducky, just ducky. And now "yum update" stalls out because of circular 
dependencies and updates have come to a halt. What does this say about the 
robustness of yum? Is it just me?

It isn't smart to put out a distro that doesn't address common denominator 
needs and desires or that fails to implement obvious functionality in 
hardware correctly detected.

Now that the CD burner works I can back up my files and risk a reinstall. Does 
anyone have experience updating to FC2 with respect to these issues? I'm 
curious about kernel 2.6.

Dave

-- 
Patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings