This is a quick HOWTO for people in the computer science dept at York Uni. Somone asked me how to burn a CD on Ios, so... [Note: If all you need is an example session, look down at the bottom] [Note 2: due to popular demand, scarily enough, I've added a bit at the bottom about burning CSss on your machine at home, too] First off, download your files. May seem a touch obvious, but anyways. My humble recommendation is connect to ios using telnet. Nowadays, telnet is a really bad choice of connection method, but ios doesn't accept ssh. The far and away best telnet client for windows is called putty, and can be found here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html Anyway. To download files, telnet to ios, and change to a suitable directory. Hint: A suitable directory is in /tmp or /var/tmp. You want to make your own dir, more for ease than anything else, so: $ mkdir /tmp/gjb105 $ cd /tmp/gjb105 [note: use _your_ username, not mine; I'm just gonna use gjb105 throughout this for simplicity] To download a file, wget is your friend. You should read the man page [type "man wget"], but basically, just type "wget http://www.foo.com/bar/filename.zip" or something like that. Netscape annoys me fairly often by corrupting downloads. Don't use it. Notice that to do all that, you don't need to sit in front of the ios itself, so you're courteously leaving it free for anyone else who wants to use it. (= You can also, if you wish, ftp stuff onto ios and friends. It's a perfectly reasonable way of doing it, but that requires you finding sufficient space elseplaces to download it there, then ftp to ios. [although, for example, to get something off sun's site, you're better off in a browser and not many people like lynx] Anyway. At this point, you should have one [or more] files in a directory, /tmp/gjb105. You need to make them into something that, when you burn them to a CD, your windows computer at home will be able to read them. [note: if you're using linux, you can do what I do which is just burn tarballs as the data instead of .isos, and then when you get home, gzip -cd /dev/cdrom | tar -xf -] So: mkisofs -rJ -o name-of-your-iso.iso9660 files-you've-downloaded You now have an iso that you can burn to CD. Unfortunately, this is a little bit harder. First, you need to find out where the burner is, so that you can tell cdrecord to burn to it. Run the command "cdrecord -scanbus", and have a look. One of the returned results will be the CD burner. You're looking for the one that has a key something like "CD-R55U" or similar. Anyway, note down that device. Now, you're ready to actually burn the CD: cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=that-device-you-worked-out-before -data iso-image-filename And after 10 seconds [it gives you a chance to change your mind], your CD will get burned. I've deliberately left out the speed=XX option, here. I'm not sure what speed the burner in ios actually is, but if anyone knows, I'd love to add it here. At the moment, that CD gets burned pretty slowly... If you're using io2s, it's supposed to [if it doesn't already] have a CD-RW, so you can re-use the coasters you've made. As a quick'n'easy thing, just add the "-blank=fast" option to the cdrecord command-line. It basically means "just erase the FAT", rather than "erase the whole CD". It makes no odds which you use unless you're trying to hide something... Again, it's in the man page. Of course, I must say, you _really_ should read the man pages for wget, cdrecord, and mkisofs, as all I've given you is the simplest variant. Note, also, that IOS DOES NOT NEED TO BE REBOOTED. Please do not reboot ios. Ios is linux. It will quite happily stay up for really quite a long time if you don't try to reboot it. Part of the deal that goes with that, though, is that you take responsibility for the crap you download. Delete it when you're done, as the temporary space on it really is limited. When it's rebooted, the temporary stuff gets wiped. I was driven to write that because the box was rebooted while I was writing this. Anyway, as promised, here's an example session: [ios:/s/ug/gjb105/]$ mkdir /tmp/gjb105 [ios:/s/ug/gjb105/]$ cd /tmp/gjb105/ [ios:/tmp/gjb105/]$ wget http://www.gopostal.com/downloads/PostalPlusDemo.exe [ios:/tmp/gjb105/]$ wget http://www-student.cs.york.ac.uk/~gjb105/index.html [ios:/tmp/gjb105/]$ ls PostalPlusDemo.exe index.html [ios:/tmp/gjb105/]$ mkisofs -rJ -o chunky.iso9660 * [ios:/tmp/gjb105/]$ cdrecord -scanbus Cdrecord release 1.8a29 Copyright (C) 1995-1999 Jörg Schilling Using libscg version 'schily-0.1' scsibus0: 0,0,0 0) 'HP ' 'C6270A ' '3828' Processor 0,1,0 1) * 0,2,0 2) 'TEAC ' 'CD-R55S ' '1.0J' Removable CD-ROM 0,3,0 3) * 0,4,0 4) * 0,5,0 5) * 0,6,0 6) * 0,7,0 7) * [ios:/tmp/gjb105/]$ cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=0,2,0 -data ./chunky.iso9660 And we're done. Now, if you're at home, pretty much all of the above applies, except that you need to do some voodoo first if you own an IDE CD burner. cdrecord works on SCSI cd burners only. This is a Good Thing (TM), because it means that Mr Schilly doesn't need to mess with all manner of scabby hardware interfaces; just the SCSI ones. Basically, to get to the point where your IDE drive is a SCSI drive [as linux sees it] is quite easy; assuming you have the suitable bits compiled into your kernel [if you're using the kernel that came in the box, you have everything you need], you need to tell linux that your CD drive is actually an ide-scsi one, so it will pretend that you've got a SCSI drive. Look in /etc/fstab. See the line there that corersponds to your CD burner? Good. For me, it was /dev/hdg. For you, it'll more likely be /dev/hdc or /dev/hdd. Anyway. When you boot your kernel, add the parameter "hdg=ide-scsi" to the command-line [or whatever it is that corresponds to your drive]. To make this work permanantly, add this to your lilo.conf: append = "hdg=ide-scsi" and run /sbin/lilo You may find that it currently is something like "/dev/cdrom"; in that case, you need to check what that symlink points to. Now, you won't [shouldn't] be able to mount your CD from /dev/hdg. So you'll need to edit /etc/fstab to reflect the change [or modify the symlink in /dev if that's the case]; your CD burner will now be on a different device in /dev. For me, it's on /dev/sr0. For you it may be /dev/scd0, or something totally different. There are two ways to find out: 1) Mount random things in /dev until you find the right one. If you're not using devfs, you'll looking at over 2 thousand devices [ok; educated guessing gets it own to about 10, but still...] 2) Read the output of "dmesg". You'll find a line along the lines of: scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices Vendor: HP Model: CD-Writer+ 9500 Rev: 1.0e Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Detected scsi CD-ROM sr0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 Which, being the case, you probably wanna use /dev/sr0. Next: If you're getting an error [I can't reproduce it anymore, as I worked out how to fix it...] something along the lines of: cdrecord: Input/output error. write_g1: scsi sendcmd: retryable error I have bad news for you. You need a new powersupply. Basically, burning CDs absolutely eats power alive. Even a slight drop in power will cause a brief internal reset on your CD burner. And you'll have a coaster. For reference, I now have an Enermax 450W Whisperquiet [my arse] PSU, and haven't made any coaster by _that_ mistake in ages. I used to have a 250W PSU powering 8 drives, and it simply couldn't handle it. Other random things: http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO.html Is a very long-winded variant on what I've just written. It's also more general than my one specifically about ios, but it's worth reading. Quick and dirty CD-copying directions: 1) Data: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/tmp/image.iso9660 cdrecord /tmp/image.iso9660 2) Music: cdrdao read-cd --device 0,0,0 --driver generic-mmc \ ./audio.toc cdrdao write --device 0,0,0 --driver generic-mmc \ ./audio.toc If you have two CD drives, it's a one-step, but that's slightly less safe. No, I will not tell you how to copy copy-protected CDs. For reference, it's generally trivial [especially LASERLOK and variants], but since I in no way approve of illegally copying anything... If you have any problems, don't hesitate to e-mail me Gary (-; PS Disclaimer: Usual one applies, plus, if you start making coasters, it's your problem not mine PPS I'm told that using gcombust is easier, but, quite frankly, if you want to know how to work something that responds to point-and-click, you're gonna have to ask someone else. I can't handle things that have a mouse as well as a keyboard.