CD-Writers are very popular now and Linux does have good support for your

cd-writer. Your cd-writer should work just fine with Linux unless you have

a really old one. If you have a SCSI cd-writer then it should work right

out of the box. If you have an IDE cd-writer then there is a little more

work involved. You will have to recompile your kernel with SCSI support. This

SCSI support is just a emulation and not an actual SCSI implementation. USB

writers are not supported as of now, though parallel port writers seem

to be.

You can check out the list of CD-Writers known to work under Linux in the

CD-Writing HOWTO.

My current config is : Red Hat 6.2

Kernel 2.2.16

Plextor 8X IDE

The Kernel

Mount the CD and install the kernel sources from the CD. Most distributions

already install the kernel sources by default so the following steps may

not be needed.

In Red Hat you would do the following.

mount /dev/cdrom

rpm -ivh /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/kernel-source-xxx.rpm

... where xxx would be the version number of your kernel. This will install

the kernel source code under /usr/src/linux

cd /usr/src/linux

make menuconfig

The following changes need to be made to the kernel configuration:

Under block devices:

Enhanced IDE/MFM/RLL - Y(es)

IDE/ATAPI Support - N(o)

SCSI emulation support - Y(es)

Loopback device - M(odule)

Under SCSI:

SCSI support - Y(es)

SCSI CDROM support - Y(es)

Enable vendor specific extensions - Y(es)

SCSI generic support - Y(es)

Under Filesystems:

ISO 9660 CDROM filesystem support - Y(es)

Microsoft Joliet filesystem support - Y(es)

Here I am enabling SCSI support right into the kernel. You can have it as

a module but then you will have to make sure that the module is loaded at

startup. Something else that you can do here, is go into the Processor

type and select the processor class that you have. This way you optimise

your kernel for your processor for better performance. Otherwise leave

everything the way it is. Exit and say yes to saving the kernel configuration.

Now comes the compiling part. Take the following steps.

make dep - This will setup the dependencies