I've been having great success burning CD's in Linux: not many coasters...BUT could someone please enlighten me about what the following phrase means? I'm trying to make a boot-able CD with X-CD-Roast, and this message concerns specifying the path to the floppy boot image, which I have made using the dd command, then copied to the same directory as the rest of the files I'm attempting to burn..

"The path must be relative to the source path of the master data".

Not getting it, I looked up the man page for mkisofs and it reads:

"The pathname must be relative to the source path specified to mkisofs."

Now, I know that these statements are probably sufficient, if you are a rocket scientist - but what the heck do they mean??? Any adaptations to the vulgar language would be much appreciated!

i think it means it wants you to have your boot image
in the filesystem you are adding the the cdrom, and
list the image as to where it exists in the fielsystem.
for example, if you are adding your /opt directory, then
you need to have the boot image in /opt somewhere,
and tell xcdroast where in /opt it is. it's just weirdo
xcdroast stuff.

You know, all it actually means is that you leave the root directory symbol out. I discovered this through trial & error. Now why couldn't they say something like: "instead of /opt/boot.img use opt/boot.img."

Anyways, I'm happy again.

xcdroast once formatted my windows partition. normally
i'm all for that. in this case i wasn't. it asked me
what partition i wanted to use for images, and i told.
then it started asking me stupid questions, and i just
started clicking ok's to make it shut up. in a few seconds
/dev/hda2 was formatted. that's why i will not use xcdroast.
i don't think a cdburning program should even have an
option to format a filesystem in it. that was maybe 4
ago though.

Who needs xcdroast? <pthoui> You have a CLUE with the command line and you get to see the real error messages.

A GUI is very useful as you can have lots of x terminals running so you have access to the real power in linux, but lots of gui apps suck IMHO.

# CD burning info
Is it configured and what is the device? Command this to find out:
cdrecord -scanbus
Adding an IDE CD-Writer to Linux
CD Writing HOWTO
# Burn an ISO to disk
cdrecord -v speed=<burning speed> dev=<your device> /path/to/foo.iso
# Burn from disk to disk
cdrecord -v dev=<your device> speed=<burning speed> -isosize /dev/cdrom
# Generate an ISO from a directory.
mkisofs -Jr -o foo.iso /path/to/directory
mkisofs -vrTJUV "Label" -o foo.iso /path/to/directory
# Generate an ISO from a CD
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=foo.iso
Linux MP3 CD Burning mini-HOWTO
# Convert mp3 to wav with lame
for i in *.mp3; do lame --decode $i `basename $i .mp3`.wav; done
# Burn a CD from wav files
cdrecord -v -audio -pad speed=<burning speed> dev=<your device> /path/to/*.wav
# Erase a CDRW
cdrecord -v dev=<your device> speed=<burning speed> blank=fast

Well, if you are a black belt, you aren't going to waste your time with the 1/4 inch plywood. You need the cement blocks! But if you are like me you need the crutch of GUI's to get you started because the learning curve is just too steep.

Agreed, when you spell it out as you have, the command line doesn't look very difficult. It even adds to the Linux mystique. I think I'll cut & paste them for future reference But if you are trying to do anything new, and you're stuck reading about all the dozens of cryptic flags in the man pages, let me tell you, a GUI is a good thing.

Thanks everybody for the help

What you talkin' 'bout, too hard?

Cut and paste is so easy in Linux. I got a few pages of handy stuff pasted into a handy dandy text file all ready with the flags I found in those silly man and info pages that people claim make no sense. TNT. ('Taint Nuttin' Toit)

I can do a search of that file, copy and paste into a terminal way faster than I can navigate a long series of "pointy clicky" stuff.

I resisted the command line almost 2 month before giving in myself.