i heard before that cd-rws only work when the system sees them as scsi, so before i compile a kernel i want to know if I need to enable the scsi support in the kernel setup, or will i be fine just by adding "append="hdc=ide-scsi"" to lilo?

To use ide-scsi you definitely need scsi support. You don't have to enable "scsi cd-rom support" however, since that is for real scsi drives. You can also leave out "ide cdrom support".

It's not a bad thing to enable scsi support at all, since it is also necessary for e.g. usb flash sticks, usb harddrives etc. etc.

It appears that in the 2.6 kernel series there is also a new driver for atapi cd drives which addresses the drives directly -- i.e. not going through the scsi layer at all. However I can't tell you much about that, haven't tried it yet. ide-scsi works fine, I even drive a dvd+-rw through it.

Indeed the drive will show up as a scsi drive: /dev/srX or /dev/scdX (depending on distro) instead of /dev/hdX.

burn away ,
nukkel

hi there
i have compiled the 2.6 kernel many a times and i think there is a option for SCSI emulation support

apart from the scsi support u ned to add

hdc=ide_scsi
in ur lilo bootloader,(hdc being ur CD/WR)
this entry may be the same for grub too

regards
gaurav

In 2.6 kernel(and maybe newer 2.4s) ATAPI burnnig support is built-in, CD burning works out of the box, you don't really need ide-scsi.
However as nukkel mentioned above it's not a bad thing to include scsi subsystem support in your kernel as a variety of devices still depend on it.

Yes, you don't need scsi-emu with the 2.6 kernel, but you do need generic scsi supprt for many devices like flash drives.

Note that there is a problem getting dvd/cd burners going with 2.6.8.1 so you should stick with 2.6.7 for the moment.