Setting up a CD-R or CDRW drive on an IDE PC in Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 ("Woody")
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2. Preparing for the installation

2.1. System requirements

I have tested these instructions on my i386 system (AMD Athlon XP 1600+ processor). I started with a fresh, clean, base installation of Woody 3.0 r0. I then installed The X Window System (core) and the desktop (Gnome and KDE) using tasksel.

All the work is done from the command-line. You can use a terminal window within X (such as "xterm") or a virtual terminal. To change to a different virtual terminal, hold down the "Ctrl" and "Alt" keys and press a function key. (<CTRL> + <ALT> + <function key> where <function key> is <F1>, <F2>, ... <F6> for terminal mode or <F7> for X.)

You will need root permissions for this installation and setting up. Good practice is to log in as a normal user and invoke the su command.

chris@athlon:~$ su
Password: (enter the root password)
athlon:/home/chris#

When you have finished, enter the exit command to resume normal user status.

athlon:/home/chris# exit
chris@athlon:~$

2.2. CD (re-)writer drive details

You need to know your CD-R or CDRW drive's recording speed and data buffer size. The speed is a number representing how much faster the drive is than 150 kBytes/s (eg 4, 8, 10, etc). The data buffer size is the number of MBytes. You can find this information on the drive's original packaging or documentation, on the Web or via software you may already use with the drive on other operating systems. Entering dmesg | grep ATAPI may also report a memory size, but I am not sure how reliable this is.

2.3. SCSI emulation

Your ide cd writer will only work if Linux is fooled into thinking that it is a scsi cd writer. To do this, you must have a kernel with the ide-scsi module. You can check this by using the command lsmod in a terminal window. You must have root permissions to do this.

chris@athlon:~$ su
Password: (enter the root password)
athlon:/home/chris# lsmod | grep scsi

If you have the ide-scsi module, you should see a line something like this:

ide-scsi                7060   0 
athlon:/home/chris#

If the ide-pci module is present, you can skip the next section and move on to installing the basic software. If you do not have the ide-scsi module you must install a kernel that does have it. The next section explains how to install a different kernel.

2.4. Text editor

Make sure that you have a text editor installed. I used emacs. The detailed instructions in this document assume that you will be using emacs, although you can use any text editor. You can install emacs with apt-get:

athlon:/home/chris# apt-get install emacs21

2.5. The adduser and deluser utilities

You will need these if you wish to allow normal users to record CDs. They are both in the "adduser" package.

athlon:/home/chris# apt-get install adduser
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