FOSSwire

K3B is an application that ships in the default KDE packages in most distributions, however it's a very useful tool that can often be overlooked.

K3B is a CD and DVD burning application that makes it easy to burn data, audio and disc images onto writable CDs and DVDs. It is a very mature, stable and fully featured application.

Open up K3B and you are presented with a split view, with directories listed on the left in a tree structure, the current directory's contents on the right and a welcome page at the bottom.

On selecting a task, such as creating a data CD, the bottom view turns into a view of the files that will be on your CD (data, in this case, but obviously it will be different for audio and other projects). You then drag and drop files from the filesystem into your project as it's called. Once you're done, you can Burn the project.

The whole burning process is very clear and should be easy for anyone familiar burning CDs with software such as Nero over on Windows to pick up and understand.

There are also options for burning images and doing 1-to-1 disc copies available from the Tools menu.

One of the main benefits of K3B is that it is such a mature project. While the tree-like interface might not be to everyone's tastes and it does occasionally seem a little outdated, the application is simple to use and intuitive for people who have used other burning software before elsewhere. It is extremely stable in my experience, and it gets the job done.

For KDE users, K3B is highly recommended for an easy, yet powerful way to burn data, audio and more to disc. GNOME users may want to try Gnomebaker, and if you're into using the command line, give cdrecord a try.

So, I've just successfully downloaded my image of Fedora 8, Werewolf (after one unsuccessful attempt) and I'm ready to burn it. It's a DVD ISO image and I downloaded it on my CLI only server.

So, how do I burn it from the command line? There are actually a couple of different programs you can use, but for this example I'm going to show you how to use cdrecord. Yes, it's called cdrecord, but it works with DVDs too, don't you know?

So I pop in a blank DVD-R disc in my drive, and run the following:

# cdrecord -v -dao speed=4 dev=/dev/dvd /path/to/Fedora-8-i386-DVD.iso

There are some things in that command that need a little explanation, so let's take a look:

-v - turns on verbose mode. If, heaven forbid, something were to go wrong with the burning process and I was to be left with a coaster, I will at least know what with this switch activated.

-dao - puts us in Disc At Once mode. Since we're burning an ISO image here, I don't want to add any more data later in a future 'session', so I can just instruct cdrecord to put it in one session and finalise the disc.

speed=4 - I keep the burning speed down as it is more likely to burn properly and not fail. You can experiment with higher speeds if you want, but don't go higher than either your media or burner state they can do (and do

dev=/dev/dvd - this is the device node for your DVD drive. It's usually safe to put /dev/dvd here, but if that doesn't work, you may need to use /dev/cdrom or something else.

Finally, I specify the path to the ISO image I want to burn.

After some interesting messages, the burn process should start and you should get a progress message showing you the amount of data that has been copied and some other diagnostic information.

Finally, you should get something along the lines of:

Track 01: 3266 of 3266 MB written (fifo 100%) [buf 97%] 39.2x.
Track 01: Total bytes read/written: 3424749568/3424749568 (1672241 sectors).
Writing time: 645.893s
Average write speed 35.7x.
Min drive buffer fill was 11%
Fixating...
Fixating time: 26.881s
cdrecord: fifo had 53944 puts and 53944 gets.
cdrecord: fifo was 0 times empty and 27183 times full, min fill was 76%.

At this point, you can eject your disc and put it to use - however that may be!