Hello -
How do you set up this program properly?
By default it uses wodim and tells me my drive/media
does not support 12x and lowers the speed to 4x/6x.

I've been able to set growisofs in the "burn" panel ("writing app"),
and lo and behold, 12x is just fine. How do you set it so that
it's always used?

Why is wodim defaulted to when it's obviously crippled?
Is there some background to these "writing apps" that I'm not aware of?
Thanks for any info in unraveling this puzzle.

Dave

if you look at cdrecord in /usr/bin you will see it is a link to wodimm, so in k3b -> settings -> programs -> user parameters -> programs -> cdrecord -> enter the parameters you desire (no idea if this will cause future issues or not).

i doubt wodimm is "crippled" but no idea why you seeing this problem, you can query the cdrtools dev's http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/ ... burn-devel if you desire or check in your distro's forum to see if they've altered the source for some reason.

fyi - wodim is contained in cdrkit which is a fork of cdrtools, discussions of this populate the web if you're interested. if available you can replace cdrkit with cdrtools if you wish (though depending on distro you may need to compile it) - again no idea if this will resolve you problem.

Thanks for your response. You can see why Linux newbies are pulling
their hair out.

Please be careful with wrong information. wodim/cdrkit is the result
of an anti-OSS campaign from Debian. There is absolutely no development
in this fork and for this reason it makes absolutely no sense
to ask the people that support this anti-OSS fork in case you like to get
information on the original cdrtools project.

For information on the original project, look at:

http://cdrecord.berlios.de

https://developer.berlios.de/projects/cdrecord/

Debian is against open source software and wodim
is one of the results? This is one of the strangest things I've
heard.

I'll look at your links, thanks for posting.

I had assumed it wasn't up to date due to the lack of proper
HW/Media detection. Question is, why does k3b use it?

In the past I have burned CDs at the fullest amount of their rating, and DVDs at 16x. I haven't burned any for quite some time, so was surprised last month to find that I was producing coasters. After much hair-tearing I found that I could only successfully burn around 6x speed. Whatever is causing this it's a huge regression, and I really don't think it changed when the burning application switched to wodim. I think it's much more recent.

I didn't have time, after all the coasters, to file a bug report, and forgot to afterwards, but we really should.

Debian massively attacks cdrtools since May 2004.

In the first year, this has been done by sending insulting mails to me, by sending "help" to users that caused therse users to get into problems and by introducing bugs into the variant distributed by Debian.

In Summer 2005, they started with a new way of attacking. They claimed that the license for cdrecord was changed and that cdrecord "for that reason" has a GPL license problem. At that time, not a single line from cdrecord was relicensed and 100% from cdrecord was under GPL - as it has been since January 1996.

As a reaction on these attacks and because nobody helped me, on May 15 2006 cdrtools was relicensed under CDDL. Since then, cdrecord is 100% under CDDL. Debian however continued to claim that there is a "GPL problem" in cdrecord.

In late 2006, Debian started something they call a "fork" and published the fork under the original names (violating the Trademarks of the cdrtools project). After they have been informed about the trademark violation, they renamed the beast to "cdrkit", but they still removed Copyright notices....

On May 6 2007 any serious activities on "cdrkit" did stop and since that tuime only minor typos are fixed.

The original cdrtools project now offers twice as many features as "cdrkit" which has been derived from a cdrtools source from September 2004.

How would you call such activities that massively attack an OSS project?

So is it feasible to use cdrtools in distro-released k3b? How safe is it to make such a change?

schily, I hear what you are saying about Debian. Why did they do it?
Did they just want to steal the work, or were they trying to promote
some kind of anti- piracy, digital rights management when dealing with DVD?

What is their motive?

@schily: please do not use this forum for your private war and respect the forum policy.

@davexnet: the problem is related to the license under which schily releases his software which is clearly not compatible with any of the Free Software licenses accepted by the major Linux distributions, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrtools#Licensing

@annew: unfortunately not, see the reasons above.

Disclaimer: IANAL and my post expresses the knowledge gathered from the above source. AFAIK there has been no evolution since 2008.

Mamarok - thanks to the pointer to wikipedia, that explains a few things.

In the distribution I use, k3b uses wodim, which doesn't seem to work
properly - it doesn't recognize the speed/capability of the media/drive.

If Debian created this fork (cdrkit) as a way for them to gain control
over the code, why is it in such a poor state, and secondly,
why does k3b use it?

davexnet -

1) K3b does not supply the sw to burn the cd it only calls what is available. The selection of wodim is a decision of the distro used - query them and/or search their developer mailing lists because I assure you it's been discussed there.

2) If you wish to use cdrecord then dl and compile it, it's your right.

ps again this is not the place to propagate the battle of wodim vrs cdrecord, forking is one of the things that allows foss to evolve

Thanks for your perspective. I would attempt the download/compilation,
but I don't want to screw with my system. I've found that if I set the
"writing app" to growisofs, the burn works fine at the media rated speed.

Am I right in assuming that growisofs is an alternative to wodim/cdrkit/
cdrecord?

If so, I'd like k3b to use it by default, but so far, I haven't found
a place where it can be set as default.

I can set it on the "writing app" pulldown in the burn window,
but that's on a burn by burn case. Otherwise it defaults back
(I think ) to wodim.

I don't mean to drag up these licensing issues, I just wanted a little
background on why k3b/wodim is like something from the twilight zone.

I don't burn many these days, but I'm interested to hear that growisofs works for you. If you want to make it the default, first copy ~/.kde/share/config/k3brc to ~/.kde/share/config/k3brc-old, then open the original file, and under External Applications you should find

cdrecord default=/usr/bin/wodim

(Check paths, but that will be correct for most distros I think). Change wodim to growisofs and you should be fine. If you have problems you can simply delete the edited file and rename the k3brc-old back to k3brc, making it risk-free.

If you make this change then do some more burns, please confirm that everything works smoothly.

annew: unless you are on a distro that modifies k3b to prevent it from looking for cdrtools, k3b will first look for the original cdrtools and use them in preference.

davexnet: I have no idea. The attacks have been initiated by a single person (Eduard Bloch). After his attacks did run for a while, Debian needed to decide whether to support the credibility of the Debian project or whether to support a black sheep. You would need to ask people from Debian why they decided to support the black sheep. They removed the working DVD support code from cdrecord and replaced it by something half baken. Is this related to DVD DRM?


Mamarok: please do not use the forum for private wars. The text from Wikipedia which you refer to contains quotes to incorrect claims from Jonathan Corbet, a person who frequently spreads pointless attacks against the cdrtools project. So your related post cannot be called balanced.

davexnet: Most problems seen with wodim go away after you upgraded to a recent original cdrtools version. The only remaining problem is "hald" or similar newer software from the same author which on Linux may interrupt the write process as "hald" ignores the state of the drive. For CDs, there is a workaround: write in -raw96r mode.

google01103: forking is based on own development that adds new features. wodim is a cdrecord version from september 2004 with debian specific bugs (but no features) added. wodim is only marketing of a dead old version, so it definitely does not help evolving - it's existence just prevents a lot of Linux users from being able to use working software. If you look at newsgroups, you will find that since about a year the most seen answer on wodim problems is the advise to upgrade to the original code. The original software did massively evolve since September 2004 and currently offers aprox. twice as many features than cdrtools did offer in 2004.

davexnet: growisofs only supports DVDs and BluRays and growisofs needs mkisofs which is only available from the cdrtools project. grosisofs has much less problems than wodim, but there was no new version since more than 3 years. Recent versions of K3b AFAIK also prefer cdrecord over growisofs.

For all of you: cdrtools is free. The best way to get own experiences is to try it out....This is better than guessing