My CD ROM (Mitsumi) and I wanted to replace it with a DVD RW combo (CD read and write; DVD read and write). I am running Mandrake 10 Official and checked the hardware supported by Mandrake but there is none listed for Plextor. ( I have had god experience with Plextor). My question is there anyone running a Plextor DVD-RW on Mandrake and if so ,how complicated is setting it up ?

Thanks for any help you can give on this subject.

Chuck Parker

I don't use Mandrake, but after checking out their HW support page, I think the basic problem here is that they list a category for CD-ROM's, CD-RW's, and DVD-ROM's, but they do not have a category for DVD-RW's. As a result, if you do a Manufacturer search on Plextor, you will get some hits, but given the absence of a DVD-RW category, you won't see any Plextor DVD-RW's listed.

Of course, you won't see any other DVD-RW's listed either, so from my point of view, that means either that the Mandrake HW Support list has a pretty major hole in its categories, or that the listing are accurate but there is no category for DVD-RW's because Mandrake itself can't support it. As I said, I don't use Mandrake, so I don't know, but it seems reasonable to assume that because other current distros support DVD-RW's, so would Mandrake.

I use a Lite-On DVD (model 811) and it is excellent, plus it's less than $70 at Newegg. Lastly, there is a lot of excellent info about DVD's under Linux in the Dec 2003 edition of Linux Journal. Definitely worth checking out. Good luck with the project. -- J.W.