I have a Pentium 166 with 128MB RAM and 2.1GB HD, running Slackware 8.1. I am thinking about buying an IDE CD burner to install in it. Would this system be fast enough to reliably burn a CD in a decent amount of time?

If so, can anyone recommend some simple burning software that would run well on this system? I'd mainly use it for data storage, but I would like to be able to burn ISO images and music CDs.

Thanks.

well there is always the grand-daddy such as k3b
but for a system like that, you'd probably get along just
fine by using Arson

but don't forget, if worse comes to worse, just use command line

Thanks for the suggestions. However, I guess I shoulda mentioned that this machine does not have KDE or Gnome. Only Windowmaker. I suppose command line tools would work fine.

But, is my system fast enough to burn a CD in a reasonable amount of time?

Well, I never had any problems with my 8x burner in a 300mhz celeron, but then that's not quite 166, is it?

It's hard to say without trying it.
A cd burner can hardly ever go to waste, anyway Do you have another machine you could use it in if your results weren't quite as good as you'd hoped?

I'm inclined to say that the machine should work just fine for burning cds. I would stick to the command line for it though, to avoid unnecessary overhead. the GUI tools are just front-ends to the command line apps anyway.

man cdrecord
man cdrdao
man cdparanoia

--Shade

hi dunno if this helps but i have been burnin cd's on a p1 166mzh with 32 mb of ram but with windows for years and i have also burned cd's on a 486 with windows 95 and 32 mb ram mainly cause linux wth a x windows system dont work on them so stuck with windows lol damn ram been expensive and to date i have only lost 1 cd i think an that was due to the bloomin IDE cable of all things comming loose in the back of the cd-rw and fixed and burnin way again

pete

I may be a newb but i am an oldtimer @ heart

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The CPU speed is adequate for burning. The internal bus speed is probably 60Mhz, regardless of the CPU speed. The IDE bus gets a fraction of the internal bus. So, buy your drive, it shoud work just fine.

Thanks for your help guys. I bought a burner, but haven't gotten it installed yet.

burncenter http://alx14.free.fr/burncenter/ is an easy to use text based burning program. I use it, it's great for not loading X, and it has menus and everything to make the process simpler