ISO burning

ashokanfarewell · 03-16-2006, 10:38 PM

Do any of the distributions include an ISO burner?

gilead · 03-16-2006, 10:42 PM

They all have several - what do you need it to do? Straight command line stuff to dump to CD/DVD via scripts? A GUI so users can just click buttons?

ashokanfarewell · 03-16-2006, 10:45 PM

Don't rip me too much for using the GUI; I *would* use the command line, but don't know enough of its vocabulary. I need the ISO burner to make a livecd (going to try MEPIS).

gilead · 03-16-2006, 11:02 PM

I'm not criticising you (or the GUI) - just looking for a better idea of what will suit your needs. If you're using KDE there's K3b (http://www.k3b.org/), if you're using Gnome there's GnomeBaker (http://gnomebaker.sourceforge.net/v2/?page_id=2). XCDRoast (http://www.xcdroast.org/) works in many environments (except mine at the moment).

I read that a lot of GUIs make calls to command line apps, so here is a cdrecord command to dump an iso out to an ATA burner:

Code:

/usr/bin/cdrecord dev=ATA:1,1,0 padsize=63s -pad -dao -v -eject /tmp/cd-contents.iso

Burning CDs is a popular activity so you can expect some more alternatives from other people here...

ashokanfarewell · 03-16-2006, 11:25 PM

I can see that CD burning would be popular, but I met one crank who insisted that ISO burning to make Linux installation discs is a type of software piracy.

gilead · 03-17-2006, 12:55 AM

You can burn ISOs of whatever you can legally download unless it's a distribution where the licence agreement forbids your from doing this. I'd expect Redhat Enterprise and a couple of others would not be allowed because you pay for them (but someone else who uses them could advise more accurately).

As far as MEPIS goes, according to http://www.mepis.org/node/1360 you can make copies of the SimplyMEPIS bootable CD and give them away for non-commercial purposes only.

ashokanfarewell · 03-17-2006, 01:23 AM

Yes, even I knew that...the fellow was being ridiculous. I thought he might have been intoxicated, because he threatened to report me and a few others for copying software illegally. Exactly to whom, I have no idea. I think he may have said he would report me to AOL, which wwould have been quite funny, because a)I'd like to hear how upset AOL would be over the "piracy" of a Linux distribution, and b)we were in Yahoo Chat, not AOL.

J.W. · 03-17-2006, 02:53 AM

Making an ISO via command line is trivial, and my preferred method consists of two steps. To illustrate, suppose you want to make an ISO image (which we'll call my_image.img) of the directory /home/user/whatever

Code:

mkisofs -r -o my_image.img /home/user/whatever
cdrecord -v speed=16 dev=0,0,0 -data my_image.img

Notes: the "dev=" setting is usually 0,0,0 but not always. You can run run "cdrecord -scanbus" to confirm. Similarly, the speed setting will depend on your equipment. Personally, I recommend burning slowly, and never faster than 16X regardless of what your top speed might be. Of course, depending on what /home/user/whatever contains the image you create isn't necessarily bootable, but regardless, this is a pretty useful (I think) way of making backups.

As for the guy who asserted that burning Linux ISO's was piracy, ignore him. Considering that the distros themselves make their products available for free download and include instructions on how to burn it to CD/DVD, claiming "piracy" is absurd. Maybe what the guy was trying to say was that if someone was burning/distributing copies of a retail version of a distro, which contained software that was not made available as part of the free download version, then he'd have a point, but a blanket "burning Linux ISO's = piracy" comment is just incorrect