Article 55767 of comp.unix.solaris: Path: matra.meer.net!goonsquad.spies.com!genmagic!bug.rahul.net!a2i!infoseek.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!news.uoregon.edu!news.bc.net!unixg.ubc.ca!newshost.ucs.ubc.ca!jim From: jim@geog.ubc.ca (Jim Mintha) Newsgroups: comp.publish.cdrom.hardware,comp.publish.cdrom.hardware,alt.cd-rom,comp.unix.solaris,comp.sys.sun.hardware,comp.sys.hp.hardware,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom Subject: Re: Need CD Recorder + Software for Sparc 20 Date: 15 Sep 1995 07:06:49 GMT Organization: Geography Department, University of British Columbia Lines: 170 Distribution: inet Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: whimbrel.geog.ubc.ca In-reply-to: devon@netcom.com's message of Wed, 13 Sep 1995 18:20:30 GMT Xref: matra.meer.net comp.publish.cdrom.hardware:6598 alt.cd-rom:50906 comp.unix.solaris:55767 comp.sys.sun.hardware:34060 comp.sys.hp.hardware:11662 comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom:22392 In article devon@netcom.com (Devon Tuck) writes: > What hardware and software would you recommend to create an ISO 9660 CD with > Rock Ridge extensions on a Solaris 2.x Sparc 20 workstation? ... > If there are appropriate FAQ sheets or "How To" guides I should be looking at, > or particular companies (especially in the CA SF Bay area) I should get in > touch with, please let me know! Here is my unofficial FAQ that I have put together that might help you a bit. Anyone who has additional information I'd love to add it in. Jim CD-ROM Recorders (CD-R) FAQ v1.0 Written by Jim Mintha (mintha@geog.ubc.ca) (all errors are mine :^) 1. What are they? ------------------ A CD-ROM Recorder (CD-R) will allow you to create a CD which can then be read by an ordinary CD-ROM reader. It is similar to a WORM drive in that once it is written it is permanent. A typical CD can store between 600 and 700Mb. In addition most CD-Rs can record other format such as CD-DA (Audio CD's), CD-I, and Photo CDs. 2. What do you need? --------------------- To create CD's you need the following: - A computer with a SCSI interface. - Enough hard drive space to hold the data - A CD Recorder - Pre-Mastering Software - Software to transfer the image to the CD-R (The last two are usually included together) 3. Who sells CD Recorders? --------------------------- (This is obviously incomplete) Phillips, Kodak, Yamaha, Ricoh, JVC, Pinnacle, Sony, Plasmon and others make CD-R's 4. Who sells pre-mastering software? ------------------------------------- For Unix the following commercial packages are available: Gear Software: Electroson USA 10 Presidential Boulevard Siute 125 Bala Cynwyd, PA USA Tel: (610) 617 0850 Fax: (610) 617 0886 CDR Publisher: Creative Digital Research 7291 Coronado Drive San Jose, CA 95129 K.C. Garrigan Tel: (408) 255-0999 x 224 Fax: (408) 255-1011 There are others too but I don't have any information on them. 5. Is there any free software for pre-mastering? ------------------------------------------------- Yes, but it currently only works with linux and only with phillips CD recorders. ftp: ftp.yggdrasil.com:/pub/dist/cdwrite/cdwrite-1.5.tar.gz ftp.yggdrasil.com:/pub/dist/mkisofs/mkisofs-1.03a.tar.gz The mkisofs will create the image. And cdwrite will transfer it to the CD-R. mkisofs can create ISO9660 disks with rock-ridge extensions as well as Audio CD's. 6. What kind of hard drive is needed? -------------------------------------- Writing a CD is a real-time process. The recorder needs a continuous data flow or you will get a buffer underrun and the CD will be ruined. A slow hard drive or a hard drive that does thermal recalibrations may not work. The safest bet is to get a AV (Audio/Video) rated hard drive and make sure you have a good quality SCSI interface. Having a larger buffer on the CD recorder also alleviates problems. 7. What does double (quad) speed mean for a CD-R? -------------------------------------------------- Most of the CD recorders now support double-speed. (and the newest ones are quad speed) This means that it can write the CD at twice normal speed. Writing a full CD at normal speed takes 74min. A double speed CD-R would take 37min to write the same CD. Remember the greater the recording speed the greater the sustained data transfer rate the drive will require. 8. What does ISO-9660, Rock-Ridge, etc mean? --------------------------------------------- There terms refer to the organization of the filesystem on the CD-ROM. ISO-9660 is the standard CD-ROM filesystem. It is designed to be interchangeable amongst various operation systems. It has the following restrictions: - no directory trees of depth > 8 - file name length < 30 characters, although this is usually limited to 8 characters plus 3 characters for the extension to be compatible with MS-DOS - No extensions for directory names - Uppercase characters only - No "odd" characters allowed. High Sierra Filesystem is another name for ISO-9660 because the ISO-9660 proposal originated in the High Sierra Hotel in Nevada. Rock-Ridge Interchange Protocol is an extension to ISO-9660 that uses System Use Sharing Protocol (SUSR) to further describe the files. This allows longer filenames, uid/gids, posix permissions and block and character devices. Essentially using the rock-ridge extensions will give you a file-system that behaves exactly like a unix filesystem. 9. What is all this talk about red/green/orange? ------------------------------------------------- Originally in 1982 Sony and Phillips published a book which described the format of Audio CD's (CD-DA) this was called the "Red Book". Based on this Sony/Phillips published the specifications for a computer data CD called CD-ROM. This book is called the "Yellow Book" This was extended again to support multimedia (audio, video, etc) and the "Green Book" was published in 1987 which described the CD Interactive (CD-I) format. In 1988 Phillips, Sony, and Microsoft extended CD-ROM to add CD-I extensions this was called CD-ROM/XA (eXtended Architecture). Kodak and Phillips teamed up to create a bridge disk that could be read by CD-I, Photo CD, and CD-ROM/XA drives. This CD specification was described in the "White Book". The difference with the Photo CD is that it was based on a write once technology. The specification for a "write-once" CD was described in the "Orange book" A CD created with one of the above formats is usually called by that colour. For example an Audio CD is referred to as a "Red Disk". An "Orange Disk" is the blank disk that you use in your CD Recorder. After you finish writing it it becomes a Red, Green, or Yellow disk. 10. What will all this cost me? ------------------------------- Pricing varies considerably depending where you live, etc. but here are some rough estimates in US$: CD Recorder: $1500 - $2500 Commercial Pre-mastering Software: $500-$2000 Blank CD's: $10-20 Jim Mintha (mintha@geog.ubc.ca) Home: (604) 731-7240 or 737-6094 Geography System Administrator Work: (604) 822-2174 or 465-5074 Fax: (604) 822-6150 or 465-6799 >> SARCAST \'sar-kast\ v. 1. To engage in the art of sarcasm << Article 55734 of comp.unix.solaris: Path: matra.meer.net!tera.mcom.com!news.Stanford.EDU!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!news.uoregon.edu!news.bc.net!unixg.ubc.ca!newshost.ucs.ubc.ca!jim From: jim@geog.ubc.ca (Jim Mintha) Newsgroups: comp.publish.cdrom.hardware,comp.publish.cdrom.hardware,alt.cd-rom,comp.unix.solaris,comp.sys.sun.hardware,comp.sys.hp.hardware,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom Subject: Re: Need CD Recorder + Software for Sparc 20 Date: 17 Sep 1995 07:03:29 GMT Organization: Geography Department, University of British Columbia Lines: 36 Distribution: inet Message-ID: References: <43e9mo$3pp@newsbf02.news.aol.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: whimbrel.geog.ubc.ca In-reply-to: osserve@aol.com's message of 16 Sep 1995 06:42:32 -0400 Xref: matra.meer.net comp.publish.cdrom.hardware:6580 alt.cd-rom:50887 comp.unix.solaris:55734 comp.sys.sun.hardware:34041 comp.sys.hp.hardware:11649 comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom:22375 In article <43e9mo$3pp@newsbf02.news.aol.com> osserve@aol.com (OSServe) writes: > In regard to questions regarding CD Recorder. > > The grand daddy of Unix recorders comes from a company called Young Minds. > This is a very good and quite expensive solution becasue it has its own > controller to deal with some of the problems of buffering. Last time I > looked a bundled solution was about $10K. If you are going ISO 9660 and > want to save money you may want to look at simply hanging recorder of a PC > which is probably cheaper. Just use NFS to get to the UNIX box. ISO will > severly limit the file names and directories. > > At have integrated the Yamaha 4X box on a PC using Easy CD-PRO. We set > FTP's NFS to get at out UNIX file system. Works great but again you have > file name limitations because of the ISO standard. By the way, because of > buffering issues you will likely be quite unhappy if you try to move an > NFS mounted file system directly to CD-ROM. We first copy to PC hard disk > and then to CD. We were not impressed at the price of unix software to pre-master CD's, so what we ended up doing is buying a PC, SCSI controller and disks, and run Linux on the PC. There is free pre-mastering available for Linux, that supports the Rockridge extensions (gives full filenames, links, etc). Users can remotely login to the linux box, which has all the unix file systems NFS mounted, and create their CD. The overall cost was about the same as buying the unix software + burner, but we ended up with a fast PC unix box to use for other things as well. Jim Jim Mintha (mintha@geog.ubc.ca) Home: (604) 731-7240 or 737-6094 Geography System Administrator Work: (604) 822-2174 or 465-5074 Fax: (604) 822-6150 or 465-6799 >> SARCAST \'sar-kast\ v. 1. To engage in the art of sarcasm << Article 55821 of comp.unix.solaris: Path: matra.meer.net!tera.mcom.com!news.Stanford.EDU!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.sprintlink.net!news.clark.net!rahul.net!a2i!dandelion.com!not-for-mail From: "Leonard N. Zubkoff" Newsgroups: comp.publish.cdrom.hardware,comp.publish.cdrom.hardware,alt.cd-rom,comp.unix.solaris,comp.sys.sun.hardware,comp.sys.hp.hardware,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom Subject: Re: Need CD Recorder + Software for Sparc 20 Date: 17 Sep 1995 11:16:10 -0700 Organization: Dandelion Digital Lines: 49 Sender: lnz@dandelion.com Distribution: inet Message-ID: <43hola$s4@kelewan.dandelion.com> References: <43e9mo$3pp@newsbf02.news.aol.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: dandelion.com NNTP-Posting-User: root In-reply-to: robsch@robkaos.ruhr.de's message of Sun, 17 Sep 1995 13:05:12 GMT Xref: matra.meer.net comp.publish.cdrom.hardware:6602 alt.cd-rom:50923 comp.unix.solaris:55821 comp.sys.sun.hardware:34088 comp.sys.hp.hardware:11672 comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom:22412 In article robsch@robkaos.ruhr.de (Robert Schien) writes: jim@geog.ubc.ca (Jim Mintha) writes: >We were not impressed at the price of unix software to pre-master >CD's, so what we ended up doing is buying a PC, SCSI controller and >disks, and run Linux on the PC. There is free pre-mastering available >for Linux, that supports the Rockridge extensions (gives full >filenames, links, etc). Users can remotely login to the linux box, >which has all the unix file systems NFS mounted, and create their CD. >The overall cost was about the same as buying the unix software + >burner, but we ended up with a fast PC unix box to use for other >things as well. Just for your information: the free pre-mastering software which creates the CD image is a single C file named mksisofs.c. It's ANSI C and should compile almost everywhere. MKISOFS can be found at: ISO 9660 File System Creation Utility 1.03 (mkisofs) tsx-11.mit.edu /pub/linux/BETA/cdrom/mkisofs-1.03.tar.gz Therefore the only thing to create a CD-ROM is a driver for a raw WORM device, so that you can enter something like dd if=CDimage of=/dev/rworm I'm afraid there are a few more steps needed than a simple raw dd. However, the cdwrite package for Linux: CD Writer 1.5 (cdwrite) sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/utils/disk-management/cdwrite-1.5.tar.gz is able to write CDs using the Philips CDD-52x recorder. I should have some patches to make it handle the Yamaha CDR100 in a couple of weeks. The cdwrite program is neither as fancy or robust as some of the commercial offerings, but it is still quite usable. I've successfully written at both 2x and 4x on the CDR100 using an image created by mkisofs and a modified copy of the older cdwrite 1.3. If SunOS or Solaris allows raw SCSI commands to be sent, I doubt it would take too much work to port cdwrite. Leonard Article 55981 of comp.unix.solaris: Path: matra.meer.net!tera.mcom.com!news.Stanford.EDU!nntp-hub2.barrnet.net!news3.near.net!paperboy.wellfleet.com!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!gatech!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!news.sandia.gov!tesuque.cs.sandia.gov!ferrari.mst6.lanl.gov!nntp-server.caltech.edu!jliao From: jliao@cco.caltech.edu (Jason Liao) Newsgroups: comp.publish.cdrom.hardware,comp.publish.cdrom.hardware,alt.cd-rom,comp.unix.solaris,comp.sys.sun.hardware,comp.sys.hp.hardware,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom Subject: Re: Need CD Recorder + Software for Sparc 20 Date: 18 Sep 1995 21:30:42 GMT Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena Lines: 12 Distribution: inet Message-ID: <43koe2$3fo@gap.cco.caltech.edu> References: Reply-To: jliao@caltech.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: vis-gw.caltech.edu Xref: matra.meer.net comp.publish.cdrom.hardware:6654 alt.cd-rom:51014 comp.unix.solaris:55981 comp.sys.sun.hardware:34162 comp.sys.hp.hardware:11718 comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom:22514 I have a Yamaha 4x CDR + Gear MM cd pre-master software running Solaris 2 on Sparc 20. I've been pretty happy with it for the last 4 months. It runs on a seperate SCSI controller with a dedicated hard drive. I occasionally have trouble writting disc at 4x speed with 5 or 6 layers deep directory, but for the most part it works fine. The only thing Gear doesn't deliver is that Yamaha can't be used as a mountable drive and I can only read at 2x. Jason -- Jason Liao, jliao@caltech.edu, Caltech 216-76 Pasadena, CA 91125