Hi. I'm new to this forum and relatively new to Linux. (Have been using Slackware 8.1 for about a month and a half now)
I have a Plextor Plexiwriter 40x12x40. To tell you the truth I don't really know how to aproach the installation of the cd-rw. I've been told that I'll have to comile the kernel and emulate scsi (or somehting along those lines). Can anybody offer any help?

If you are using the stock kernel, you don't need to recompile at all, just pass an option onto the kernel at boot time. Edit /etc/lilo.conf and add this line:

append="hdX=ide-scsi"

Where X is whatever your cdrom is, probably hdc; re-run lilo so it writes to the MBR again, reboot and there should be a scsi device scan in your "dmesg" with the drive now listed as "/dev/scd0"

Pick you favorite GUI burning front-end like Xcdroast, compile it and have fun!

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi,
Fin, I am a bit puzzled, remember in some other thread regarding scsi emulation we had a discussion about /dev/scd0 and /dev/sr0, I still cannot figure them out yet, in old RH setup I had my CD-R/RW listed as /dev/scd0, now with Slackware it is /dev/sr0, do you know the difference between the two, or it is just a name convention?

Yeah, honestly man I have no idea... the kernel assigns the /dev/ entry that it gets registered under. I remember from Slack 8.0 it was /dev/sr0, now I get /dev/scd0, but they were both 2.4.x kernels... really, beats the heck out of me. I disabled scsi emulation on my machine recently because the cdrw was an actual scsi burner and I had some issues with the dvdrom being under scsi emulation not playing dvds right.

Thanks for reminding me of that though, so if the device shows up as /dev/sr0 for the other guy he won't get lost.

Cheers Neo,

Finegan

thanks fin but I can't get it to work.
I have two kernels. The original one (stock), and a modified one which I sometimes play around with. I added append="hdc=ide-scsi" to both in the lilo.conf and none worked.(yes, my cd-rw drive is hdc)

In the slackware startup I managed to catch some message assigning the writer to some /dev/... but I didn't catch it. I tried both /dev/scd0 and /dev/sr0. No result.

Any ideas?

ps. what is the "dmesg". All the text that comes out in the startup? Is there any log file for that?

i've managed to catch this sentence at the begining.
"Attached sr0 at scsi0 channel 0 id 0 lun 0"
then it says something along the lines of
sr0: (info about my writer)

---
so i try
mount /dev/sr0
it says this:
mount: can't find /dev/sr0 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

so what i'm thinking is that i can manually modify /etc/fstab, right?
if so, what is the syntax in that file. i can't recognize which # is channel or id and all that.

well it is a straight forward concept
/dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,owner,ro 0 0
for simlicity you can create a symlink in to /dev/cdrom or /dev/cdrw whichever suits you better in your /dev/ directory
ln -s /dev/sr0 /dev/cdrom
and adjust /etc/fstab
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,owner,ro 0 0
Make sure also that mount point - /mnt/cdrom in this case - exists

i'm a little confused though. If i assign the cd-rw to mount in /mnt/cdrom, where will I mount my other cd drive?

Assign one to /mnt/cdrom and the other to /mnt/cdrom2.

BTW if you want to see what happened on boot check out the logs in /var/log

I managed to get the drive to read disks after adding the append line to lilo.conf and that other stuff to fstab. My question is, why does it only work with the stock kernel like fin said it would?

Its not that it would only work with a stock kernel, its just that a lot of people get bad advice and compile their own and don't know what support to include so they leave it out and then end up stuck with a kernel that can't do the job when the stock was fine... heck all of the modules necessary to properly use a burner have been part of Slackware default kernel since 7.0, 2+1/2 years ago, and maybe older... that's just the oldest I've used.

Cheers,

Finegan

right, but what about my sound? I had to recompile the kernel to get my sound working. As I mentioned I have both kernels to choose from at startup. But, the options I use don't work in my "sound kernel".

Recompile the "sound kernel" to support ide-scsi emulation:

ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support --->
IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices --->
„_<M> SCSI emulation support


also at the top tree:

SCSI support --->

--- SCSI support type (disk, tape, CD-ROM) „_ „_
„_ „_ <*> SCSI disk support „_ „_
„_ „_ (40) Maximum number of SCSI disks that can be loaded as modules „_ „_
„_ „_ <M> SCSI tape support „_ „_
„_ „_ <M> SCSI OnStream SC-x0 tape support „_ „_
„_ „_ <*> SCSI CD-ROM support „_ „_
„_ „_ [ ] Enable vendor-specific extensions (for SCSI CDROM) „_ „_
„_ „_ (2) Maximum number of CDROM devices that can be loaded as modules „_ „_
„_ „_ <*> SCSI generic support

Most importantly SCSI cdrom support and generic support.

If I remember right that's everything.

Cheers,

Finegan

thanks fin. I'll work on this tomorrow cause I'm kinda busy at the moment. I'll keep you guys posted on my results.

ok i got it all working. thanks everyone who helped.