CD-ROM settings and bash resources

I've noticed that my HP CD-Writer 9100+ has trouble reading large files off of a burn under Mandrake 9.0. This problem doesn't occur in Windows. I think it may be the read-ahead setting. Does anyone know anything about this?

Also, what are some good sites for learning bash scripting techniques? I want to write a function in my .bash_profile file that puts a specific Makefile in a new dir when I create the new dir under ~/313/Proj[5-9]. Can anyone assist?

Regards,

Bryan Simmons 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 
 "All that's required for evil to flourish
  is for good men to remain silent." 
    ---Edmund Burke
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 

Hello Bryan , Fyi , Mentioning M$-widows if only saying that the hardware itself is funtioning , can (and usually does) illicit a smaller response from some groups . Also might want to post a little more info about the device & system & kernel . That informaiton will help others to help you . I for one have an HP CD-Writer+ 9200 scsi hanging off of a lsi-53c1010-66 on board controller . If you can , posting on a webpage someplace the output from 'dmesg' and giving the Url: to it here is a good option as well .

A good referance to bash stuff ... Hth , JimL

http://www.caliban.org/bash/index.shtml

--

       +------------------------------------------------------------------+
       | James   W.   Laferriere | System    Techniques | Give me VMS     |
       | Network        Engineer |     P.O. Box 854     |  Give me Linux  |
       | [email protected] | Coudersport PA 16915 |   only  on  AXP |
       +------------------------------------------------------------------+

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs

I meant to reply earlier but it slipped my mind.

First, it would help to be a bit more descriptive than just to say "has trouble reading large files". What sorts of files? What sort of trouble? What application software is involved?

Without that detail, here is just a guess ... under Linux, DMA is not enabled on the drive (I'm assuming here that this is an ATAPI drive, another detail you omitted). You can check this (and if need be correct it) with "hdparm" ... the man page will give you the details.

[...]

[...]

--
-------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--------
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, California, USA [email protected]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs

Sorry to all for not being more descriptive. Here are my specs as far as I can tell:
1. Kernel: 2.4.19mdk (Mandrake 9.0)
2. CD-RW: HP CD-Writer+ 9100 (ATAPI) ,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0

The CDs I'm trying to read were made in Windows (98, 2000, XP) with this very same drive about a year ago. They all contain home-made movies that I created in XP. The range in sizes is 9MB to 200MB. Now, I have never been able to play any of them directly off of the disk in Windows, but I have always been able to transfer them from CD to hard disk. My problem in Linux is that the drive "stalls" during a copy or a read of the media during playback in xine or kaboodle or xmovie, etc... It would play the first 30 seconds of the film and then stall out. The media program freezes and the drive is locked until I kill the processes accessing it. The same is true when I attempt a copy from CD to hard drive in Konqueror. The copy window says it transfered 4MB and then the drive status windows says "stalled" and that's as far as I can get.

I figure there is a setting in some config somewhere that will get me better performance when dealing with CD-R media. I thought that there might be a parallel between the "read ahead" setting in the driver under Linux as well as Windoze.

BTW, I'm NOT pro-Windoze. I'm trying to set all this up under Linux so that I never have to use MS software again.

Oh, I'm also looking to upgrade my system considerably. Right now I'm running an old AMD Athlon 650Mhz with a 9GB and 20GB two-drive setup. I want something fast and cheap that is Linux approved or Linux friendly. Does anyone know of a web storefront that sells such hardware or will I have to simply shop with a list of known compatible hardware?

Thanks in advance guys!

Regards,

Bryan Simmons 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 
 UFO's are real.  The Air Force is a hoax.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 

Another problem, hdparm when run as root like this:
hdparm -ab /dev/scd0
or
hdparm -ab /dev/cdrom

Gives me the error message:
/dev/cdrom[scd0] not supported by hdparm

Does this mean that I have the name of the device wrong or that hdparm won't parlais with my hardware?

Regards,

Bryan Simmons 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 
 UFO's are real.  The Air Force is a hoax.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 

hdparm works with atapi (ide) devices, not scsi devices. Since you say below that this CD-RW drive is ATAPI, this incompatibility presents no problem. Just run hdparm on the underlying atapi device (/dev/hd*) that you are using ide-scsi emulation to access as scsi.

But the additional details you report below make me doubt the DMA guess, anyway ... that problem manifests itself as skipping in the video, not as the sort of "stalling' you describe below. And it is not confined to one disk; it occurs with any disk that needs to be accessed fast. This problem, as I read your description, is specific to this CD and occurs with any file on it (or at least a large number of choices).

This problem sounds like a marginal burn to me, perhaps a multisession burn that's gone bad ... something I've seen in both Windows and Linux with CDs burned under Windows by an inexperienced user of the Windows CD software. Or perhaps there is some filesystem incompatibility ... does the disk provide s normal-looking "ls -l" listing and a reasonable "df" report? You also might try doing the transfer running "mv" or "cp" from an xterm or a console, to see if you get better results (or at least more descriptive error messages).

Were I you, I'd use Windows to get these files off the bad CD and onto a hard disk somewhere. Then I'd move them to a Linux filesystem on this machine, and use Linux CD creations tools (mkisofs to make the image, and cdrecord or cdrdao to handle the actual burn) to make a new, single-session burn.

Finally, as to your search for a site that sells "Linux-approved" hardware ... there are a small number of vendors who are still in this business, but many failed or changed business models after the dot-com crash. The ones that remain (at least the ones I know of) are expensive. Assuming you know hardware reasonably well, the economical way to get a "Linux friendly" system is to build your own. (At least as far as desktop systems go; laptops have their own set of problems, and I've no experience there, just observation of the struggles of others.) Buy any decent mobo, its standard memory, any modern IDE hard drive (or most any newer SCSI drive and controller), and any standard ATAPI CD-RW drive.

You don't mention how you are capturing video, but there you have to be careful, as only some of the common devices (best card-based ones use the bt-8*8 chips; I don't know the USB stuff well enough to advice you there) are supported by the video4linux drivers in the 2.4.x kernel. In the vidcap stuff I do, I've had trouble recording sound with on-mobo VIA chipsets (though they work fine for playback, there is some problem with /dev/mixer), but I've used Yamaha and Ensoniq-compatible sound with no problem.

For playback of video (since you use xine and xmovie, you probably already know this part), you want a display card with a chipset whose X server supports xVideo -- the ATI driver is good at this, the Savage one does not work right (unless that's been fixed recently), and I'm not familiar with the small number of others. If you don't have xV available, xmoive still works fine, but xine need to use xShm, and the required context switches make that a CPU hog.

--
-------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--------
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, California, USA [email protected]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs