Quick Tip: When K3b is just too much

September 16, 2007

It’s nice to have GUIs available for when we just don’t feel like reading the fine manual. But other times, it’s much quicker and more satisfying to bang out a command and be done with it. It’s especially satisfying when the command is intuitive enough to avoid looking up the details. cdrecord has historically been a cryptic command, but actually is quite easy to use for specific purposes. For example, burning ISOs is a quick job with cdrecord. Here’s how:

$ cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom speed=16 slackware-11.0-install-d1.iso


This command, for example, burns the Slackware 11.0 disk 1 to /dev/cdrom at a speed of 16x. The ‘-v’ flag simply means verbose. If /dev/cdrom is your burner, you’re in business. cdrecord might complain that addressing devices by /dev/ node is unsupported, but it has always worked for me.  I use 16x typically when burning bootable images, as it usually leads to more reliable results.

By contrast, Windows XP doesn’t even ship with a tool to burn ISOs, though there is an excellent shell extension designed for that purpose. Simply more proof of how useful your typical Linux distro is out of the box.

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