Gnometoaster Documentation
December 20. 1999

[Previous] [TOC] [Next]

Setting up your System to use Gnometoaster

If you have installed all of the above packages, the hardware requirements are met, and you have an SCSI burner, then you can skip this section. If, like me, you have an IDE burner (HP 7x00 series, Acer, other cheap burners) you have a bit of tweaking to do first . . .

An Aside (How IDE burners work)

CD Recordable's were SCSI first, then, when the technology stabilized, IDE burners hit the market. The reason new technology goes to SCSI first is that it is faster, and has better transfer rates. Once improvements in IDE were introduced (UDMA) and fast machines got cheap, IDE was feasible. However, at this point all CDR software (Windows and Unix) was designed to work with SCSI only.

Rather than rewrite all CDR software, developers decided to make the IDE burners appear to be SCSI devices to the CDR software. In Windows, this is done via Adaptec's ASPI layer. In Linux, one has to make the OS think that the drives are in fact SCSI. This is done by recompiling the kernel without IDE CD-ROM support, but with SCSI emulation support, SCSI CD-ROM support, and SCSI generic support compiled in. Details for setting this up can be found in the next section.

Setting up your Kernel for CD Writing

If you've never recompiled your kernel, and you really want to try burning, then read on. If you'd rather ditch your current CDR and pick up a new SCSI one, feel free. Either way, know this: Recompiling the kernel isn't a question of if in Linux, it's a question of when. Also, it's not that bad, and isn't as scary as it sounds. So, without further adieu, here we go:

  1. Download and install your kernel sources. If you're using RedHat, SuSE, Caldera, or Mandrake, a copy should be on your CD. For Red Hat/Mandrake it is in /RedHat/RPMS/kernel-source*.rpm, make sure to grab the headers and the docs as well (kernel-header*.rpm and kernel-doc*.rpm) Install by typing:
         rpm -Uvh <rpm> 
    
    On a Debian system, you can use dselect or apt to get the sources. If this isn't working, any system can take the latest sources from http://www.kernel.org.
  2. At the prompt, type:
    # cd /usr/src/linux
    then:
    # make menuconfig
  3. A bunch of files will compile, then a screen will present itself (Pictured right)
  4. Once your system has rebooted, type dmesg | more. Look for the entries that mention SCSI devices. On my system, the device /dev/scd0 is on ID 0,0,0 and the device /dev/scd1 is on ID 0,1,0. These numbers are very important. Write them down.
  5. Start Gnometoaster. You remember, the application that's made you read through all of this!
This is a document on Gnometoaster, not kernel compiling, if the above didn't get you up to speed, please see the Kernel Recompiling How-To, and the CDR How-To. These are great resources that go in to much detail.




[Previous] [TOC] [Next]