Nero CD/DVD burner equivalent for ubuntu?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday 12 April 2006 06:10, C Hamel wrote:
> I had to chuckle & Bry's note... not much left, huh.  Then I come
> down to yours & realize I've got company.  My problem is partly a
> CD-R drive which is starting to become a little flakey.  I  can
> burn an ISO to CD w/o any fuss but can't seem to burn a CD-RW to
> save my used-to-be-sizeable you-know-what. I have an IDE --> USB
> converter cable on which I would hook one of two CD/DVD burners and
> that, too, has gone south on me. :-\ <LOL>  Guess I'm going to have
> to burn DVDs & CD-RWs on my rarely-used (because it has XP on it)
> desktop box.

A quick comment on optical drives in general:

These things are notoriously fickle and subject to weird behaviour. I 
spent more years of my life than I care to remember fixing them - 
everything from cheap CD players to high-end audio players to PC 
equipment, and often it felt like getting decent laser units was more 
like a lottery than anything else.

Quality varies widely and it was common to get a good shipment from a 
reputable supplier, and the next shipment was junk. Same items, same 
markings, apparently same original manufacturer but one worked and 
one didn't. Go figure. It's not just the el-cheapo units that are 
affected, I see the same thing happening with Toshiba, Sony and 
Matsushita's stuff.

Expected life these days from a CD reader is about 18 months, writers 
vary much more. A quick easy way to check them is to look directly at 
the laser lens (with the thing off of course). If it appears 
discoloured with a yellowish tinge, it's on the way out.

The laser power level can be varied by software control, and excessive 
current burns the lens like this. If you are finding that a drive 
works OK in Windows but not in Linux, the most likely explanation is 
that the Linux code was not written with today's cr at p lasers in mind 
and is burning them out. Not much you can do about that except change 
the code.

-- 
If only you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five