I recently (finally) got a CD Burner. When I plugged it in though, it was only detected as a cd-rom drive. So here is what I had to do to get it working. I’ve already forgotten what brand it was.

1. Open a terminal, type su -l and then your root password when you are asked to provide it.

1. Type dmesg in a to find the device. Look through the devices mentioned (this is a list of what Linux did when it started the computer). Mine says hdc: ATAPI CD-RW 52XMax, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

1. Now type gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf. Find a reference like the following: kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-13.9 ro root=LABEL=/ and add hdc=ide-scsi to the same line where ‘hdc’ is what was at the beginning of the line in dmesg where your cd burner showed up. MAKE SURE THERE IS A SPACE BETWEEN WHAT WAS ALREADY THERE AND WHAT YOU ADD! If you have more than one spot where you have a line starting with ‘kernel’ in this file, to be safe you should add the info to each one.

1. I’ve had some trouble with it lately, but there is cd-burning software built in to the GNOME file manager. If I find something else that’s good I’ll let you know. In the terminal as root still, type chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrecord

1. Reboot your computer now.

1. When everything is back to working normally, insert a blank disc (after you’ve logged in and everything).

1. A window opens automatically. In the ‘Location’ bar just below the icons, you should see burn:///If one doesn’t open, right click your desktop and click ‘New Window’. In the location bar type burn:///

1. Now you can open another file manager window (or right click your desktop and click ‘New Window’. Find the files you want and drag the files into the ‘burn’ window and drop them there.

1. Click the ‘write to cd’ icon in the toolbar.

1. Add a name that the CD will appear as whenever you use it (CD Name), etc. Uncheck ‘reuse’ unless you plan to burn more copies of this same CD.

1. Burn away!

Hope that works for you. Leave comments if you have any programs you recommend, or find a problem in this little how-to so we can fix it. One thing that you may experience that I think occurred on my computer is that whenever there is an update to the ‘cdrecord’ program, I believe you’ll have to redo the chmod step as root or you will not be able to burn CDs. I’m not sure why by default only root can burn CDs. That makes no sense to me.