Complete Noob to CD and DVD burning
 

Hi again, I have been reading tutorials on burning CD's and DVD's in linux. The whole thing seems like a mess. I have kernel 2.6.14 installed. Can I just mount the drive in ISO9660 and copy files over or what? Do DVD's use a different format? Also can you burn an encrypted disc?

You can use a gui like k3b or gnomebaker if don't like using the command line. DVDs are different to normal CDs so your method may not yield good results.

You can do it the easy way using something like k3b, a GUI burning front end or do it command line style using mkisofs and cdrecord.
There are other programs.
Give k3b a try.

Well, I'm the kind of guy who likes to do things the hard way first, so I would like to learn the command line way. I have heard that the 2.6.14 kernel now supports writing directly to CD's without SCSI emulation. I'm also wondering if the 2.6.14 kernel supports writing to the CD by say the cp command. Is cdrecord the defacto linux way of burning from the console or has things changed?

I was certain this would be an easy question.

AFAIK you can't cp to a cd. You could create an iso image, copy to the iso image, but then you
still need to run cdrecord to actually burn the disc.

cdrecord is still the defacto standard and AFAIK all of the GUI front ends use it.

You can burn DVD's with cdrecord. You just need to specify the proper device.

I'm not sure what you mean by burn encrypted disc. You can certainly encrypt your
data and then burn it.

Zack

Thanks, that's what I needed to know. By burning an encrypted disc I mean is there a way to have your files automatically encrypted on a disc. I read an article where a guys set up a loop back device (not sure what that is) that would automitically run AES encryption before writing to a file. I'm wondering if that can be done with a directory or a CD.