cd burning from within puppy without creating an iso first?
 

hello all,

first things first: what a great distro! my primary hard drive packed in a couple of days ago, and this prompted me to try puppy, and so far, so good. i've had a few teething problems here and there, but generally: awesome!

anyway, I was just wondering if it was possible to burn a CD from puppy. I tried with Graveman, but it started creating an iso, which inevitably filled up my ram very quickly (i've got 512MB and by the time puppy's all loaded up with all my customisations etc, it's down to ~150MB). I know that k3b can burn CDs on the fly, that is without creating an iso first, I was wondering if there was something similar in puppy? I had a look around in graveman, but didn't see anything like "burn on the fly"...

thanks folks

Presently, graveman does not have an on the fly mode (though I see documentation indicating that it is coming soon)

ah, fair enough.

presumably then I need to setup some sort of swap directory so that graveman can dump the iso file in there. I saw on barry's news that ntfs write support is around the corner?... I only have an ntfs drive in (at the moment), so i'll be able to set something up on that drive when ntfs write is supported. of course by then, I'll bet graveman supports on-the-fly burning... just my luck!

thanks for the info

LOL. You could also use a USB flash drive if you have one.

Good Luck - I have a frugal pup201 on a W98SE machine with 390MRAM & a 20G drive. I tried making a 200Mb pup_swap file and the iso wouldn't use it (Graveman just seemed to swap RAM contents into the swap file & only used 60Mb). Graveman wanted a temp folder. So I made a root/temp folder symlinked to a windows/temp file outside pup_save.3fs but Graveman complained it could't use this either.

It seems unfortunate to have to make a 1G pup_save.3fs just to be able to burn a 700Mb CD.

i burn cds from the command line. by piping mkisofs through cdrecord, i don't need temp space for an iso. i wrote a script to burn everything (files, folders, symlinks to files and folders) in /tmp/burn/. the line that does the burning looks like this:

mkisofs -R -joliet-long -relaxed-filenames -f "/tmp/burn/" | cdrecord -tao -v dev=ATAPI:/dev/hdc speed=2 -data -overburn fs=16m driveropts=burnfree -eject -

but you don't need all of those options. note that you need the - at the end of the line. this is not multisession. you can burn multisession from the command line too, but it's a little trickier

Puppy 2.10 will be using a new CD burning program
WishCD

full list of changes
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy210

Graveman's default tmp is in /root, that's why you run out of space.
Got to the Graveman prefernces and change the tmp to some directory on a HD partition that has enough room for the iso.

GuestToo: your solution still requires room in the pup_save file... should mention that changing "-f "/tmp/burn" " to your directory of choice will solve it...
(it's probably possible to use a few paths, isn't it?)

when i posted that, i was using Puppy 1.0.8, that has /tmp in ram, so the space i had in /tmp is ram plus the free space in the swap partition

in Puppy 2.x, writing to /tmp writes to the save file

in either case, i simply symlink as many large files as i like in /tmp/burn, up to the size of the disc, and burn the files automatically by running my script ... the files are not copied or moved to /tmp, and mkisofs/cdrecord do not create any large files like temporary isos in /tmp

so it is not necessary to have 700 megs of free space to burn a cd, or 4 gigs of free space to burn a dvd

Hey, mate, that's a great idea!
I never thought of symlinking, good to know it works (i.e. doesn'r burn the links...).

that's what the -f is for, to follow symlinks

you can put real files in your burn dir too, like md5sum files or par2 files

When I tried to use a symlinked tmp folder (see 30JUL above) Graveman gave an error message that it could not create a file in the symlinked folder.

At the time I was using frugal pup201 dual booted to a W98SE system & had created the symlinked Graveman tmp file by an instruction like -

ln -s /mnt/home/windows/temp /root/Gtmp

where /root/Gtmp was then selected asGraveman temp folder. The Windows/temp
folder is in the W98SE file system and the drive has >20G available.

Perhaps I'm creating the symlink wrongly or is it a permissions problem?

I have now upgraded to pup202sm & will have to wait until my CD RW drive (currently on loan) is back before I can try GuestToo's command line option.

Am I right in thinking that the comments in this thread apply to frugal (dos-booted) pups as well as grub/lilo booted pups?

you may not be able to use a folder on a FAT32 partition for Graveman's temp dir ... i'm not sure, i rarely if ever use Graveman

FAT32/vfat partitions do not support Linux's permissions

it shouldn't matter how you booted Puppy

AAh - this could explain my dilema - thanx for the info.

Now I have a solution :)

To recap:
Using Graveman to create large (>600Mb) data CDs on my Frugal systems with <400Mb free makes Graveman hang.

My Frugal system is puppy2.02sm booted by pup4dos from a W98SE system with puppy system files (vmlinuz etc) on harddrive in the main windows C:\ directory. My puppy reports around 360Mb memory.

If I try to make large data CDs in one step, Graveman will hang when the puppy's memory is full, because Graveman first creates an iso file in tmp memory (within puppy) and then uses the iso file to burn the CD.

The problem is that on my Frugal mounted puppy, Graveman won't allow a tmp folder outside puppy in the windows section - either by direct access or by symlink.

My solution is to burn the CD in 2 stages -
a) Use Graveman to create an iso of the data at a location on a windows sector - this works fine :)
b) Then use Burniso2CD to burn the CD from the above iso file - this also works fine :)