The usual stuff

[altivo]

It was Wednesday after all. Apparently a small flood took place in the library yesterday after I left. A pipe or conduit in the air conditioning system poured water through the ceiling onto the carpet. Consequently a part of the system was shut down. Fortunately the weather today was mild compared with yesterday.

That VT220 terminal I got for $22.01 off EBay a couple of weeks ago arrived today. Minus the keyboard, though the listing promised both terminal and LK201 keyboard, which was the point of my purchase. Message sent to seller to find out if the keyboard was sent in a separate box. The shipping notice from PayPal has two tracking numbers, one UPS and on USPS. Would someone actually send part of the device through UPS (that's what has arrived) and the other piece through parcel post? Doesn't that seem, well, bizarre? [EDIT Thurs. AM: Bizarre or not, that's apparently what he did. Hasn't arrived yet but e-mail confirms it.]

Discovered that it's not just the NIC in the Optiplex 380 that confuses Linux distros, but also the Realtek sound chip. Oddly though, it seems that the sound worked in Karmic Koala and broke in the Lucid Lynx release.

Anyone know about writing CD-R media with a DVD-R drive? Is it possible? Is it advisable? I tried one today (the new machines have DVD-R drives rather than CD-R) and couldn't read it back either on the same machine or on another. The writing software did recognize the media as CD-R and used the correct speed, but the result appears to be unreadable.

Comments

[calydor.livejournal.com]

I have successfully burned CD-R in a DVD-RW drive several times, so it should be doable. You may have either a bad disk or just been unlucky with the burn. If possible, try a different brand of disk.

What software did you use?

[altivo]

This is Xubuntu, so I first tried the default "Brasero" and when that produced an unreadable CD, I went to my tried and true "cdrecord" (command line program) but got the same results.

I was using a CD-RW, though, which may have been the issue. Retried Brasero this morning with a CD-R and it worked OK.

[corelog.livejournal.com]

Yes, you can burn CD-R media in a DVD-R drive. I've done it several times, but I've found a couple things to improve my success rate.

Mostly, I limit the speed of the burn. Yes, the media may be rated for 24x or 40x or whatever, but I don't find the drive's accuracy to be acceptable at that rate. I'll often limit the burn speed to 16x, 24x if I'm feeling like living on the edge.

Also, I'm very specific about my software to accomplish the burn. I've had good success with Nero and InfraRecorder (the latter of which is free). By contrast, I've had nothing but problems with ImgBurn or PowerISO. I find a piece of software that works well, and stick with that. Combined with the burn-rate limit, I have good success overall.

I don't think it's either advisable or inadvisable. I don't have any issues with it, provided I use good software with a decent burner, with the manual options set.

By the way, a package is on its way to you.

[altivo]

It seems that either the drive or the software didn't like the Maxell CD-RW I used, even though it was blank to start with. They didn't complain, but the results were no good. Retried this morning with a Maxell CD-R and it worked just fine.

This was with Ubuntu's default Brasero and again with the old command line cdrecord that I've used for years.

The sound issue mentioned in the post is corrected by running a patch program at startup. Seems that by default they are connecting the sound chip to a dead-end mixer device. That leads to another Ubuntu bug: it wasn't executing /etc/rc.local (where I installed the patch) at all. Both the sound thing and the rc.local thing have been reported on launchpad since last fall, neither has been properly addressed yet. Black marks for the Ubuntu team on this, especially the rc.local issue. I'd let them off on the sound chip, since it's a relatively new device, except that it was working in the early Karmic kernel and they broke it sometime even before Lucid came out.

Package? Should I send you some dollars?