On 14-Mar-06 Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 16:58 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
Hi Folks,
Can experienced persons recommend an external USB DVD reader and writer which works well with Linux?
(I would be driving it from a Red Hat 9 laptop).
Not specifically no, But I am really fond of Lacie kit. At the lower end of the market Freecom drives aren't bad either.
Also: would there be any problems writing files to it from filesystems on other machines which are NFS-mouted on the laptop?
Most modern drives are "BURN Free" and therefore protected against buffer under-runs so even if your network cannot keep up with the writes you should be ok.....However you are going to be careful on how you set up the burn process (a lot of GUI disk burning tools prepare an image first) and even with the more traditional mkiso followed by cdrecord you are going to have to make sure you create the iso on the NFS drive and then burn it from that location.
Just another thought...normally it is possible to replace the Laptop's internal CD ROM drive with a CDRW...They are pretty generic (apart from a few "standards" for mounting the front bezel) and a rare master/slave issue (that only usually bites on some Toshiba machines) Just thinking that from both a portability and cost perspective this may be a better option.
Many thanks for these thoughts, Wayne.
Re the last one: It's a rather old Compaq Armada 1750, and looking at it I feel doubtful about being able to replace the existing CDR drive. However, it's an interesting idea and, who knows, might work!
The ISO would need to be created on one of the other machines (the SuSE 7.2, 2.4.4 kernel) since that's the only one with enough spare HD space.
Maybe the thing would be to replace its existing internal CD-R/W with an internal DVD-R/W (which might be cheaper than the external USB anyway), provded I can install appropriate drivers. Writing CDs is already somewhat temperamental!
Any further comments welome -- I've never dabbled yet in the DVD world.
Best wishes, Ted.
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