Q I'm trying to build a CD duplicator from an old Sempron-based machine with four IDE CD-RW drives and a SATA hard disk. I've installed Ubuntu 9.04 and tried GnomeBaker and K3b but they don't seem to support multiple CD burning. We need to produce about 200 CDs for various projects at the school where I work and I wondered if you had any ideas that a newbie could cope with.
A I'd use a shell script for this, after creating the ISO image with whichever program you prefer. A script is far better suited to such a repetitive task than having to keep pressing GUI buttons. You could use something like this
#!/bin/sh DEVICES="/dev/cdrom0 /dev/cdrom1 /dev/cdrom2 /dev/cdrom3" for DEV in DEVICES; do cdrecord -eject dev=$DEV "$1" & done
Type this into a text editor, such as Gedit, list your CD writer devices in the DEVICES line, save the script somewhere in your path - say, /usr/local/bin/multiburn.sh or ~/bin/multiburn.sh - and make it executable. If you save it in the bin folder in your home directory, you can use your file manager to set the permissions: right-click on the file and select Properties. Otherwise, set the permissions in a terminal with
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/multiburn.sh
Assuming you have made the ISO image with K3b or whichever mastering program you prefer, put a blank CD in each of the drives and run the script, giving it the path to the ISO image.
multiburn.sh /path/to/image.iso
When all four discs have ejected, replace them and run the command again. You could modify the script to run again after a keypress. There are only two keypresses to rerun it (Up and Enter) so it's not a time saver, but it may be a good learning exercise if you're so minded.