The Man to the Rescue

It pays to be familiar with your Linux system’s man pages, and an event yesterday was a perfect example of a man page coming to the rescue. My sister-in-law is dating a German national, and he and five friends are in the United States for a few months on business internships. Because they will not be able to celebrate Easter with their families, Kate invited them all to share Easter with our family.

I took several digital pictures, as I always do at family events. The guys played soccer with my three-year-old son Timothy, and the ladies were quite taken with my 9-month-old son, Patrick (never let it be said that babies are not chick magnets). This is also the first year Timothy went on an Easter Egg hunt, and they were all happy to be a part of that. And because we live in a rural area (a cornfield butts up against my in-laws’ back yard), this allowed them to see more than just the city and get some fresh air.

I wanted to make sure they had copies of the pictures to take home with them, so I fetched my laptop and external CD player from home, just a few blocks away. Unfortunately I had not yet used the burner with the laptop, and I didn’t have Internet access. I had the K3B package downloaded, so I installed it but it would not run. It produced an error I previously ran into on my home machine that was easily resolved, but I didn’t recall how to resolve it and, again, didn’t have quick Internet access to find the solution. To make matters worse, Nautilus let me down as it had before, turning a couple CDs into coasters.

Enter the man pages. I ran apropos cd burning and was presented with a number of packages. cdrecord appeared to be the one for me, so I ran man cdrecord. Like most man pages, the plethora of options make it look rather intimidating. Once you start reading, however, the majority of the options may not apply to your situation.

The first trick was figuring out the device designation, but this was easily figured out with a look into /var/log/messages. It only took about five seconds of trial-and-error to verify my device was dev=1,0,0 — scsibus 1, target 0, lun 0.

Then, at the bottom of the man page, there’s an examples section. I used two of the examples, modifying them slightly for my files and device setting:

mkisofs -R -o easterpics.raw /home/mike/easterpics/*
cdrecord -v speed=2 dev=1,0,0 easterpics.raw

The first line created an ISO image of my files, and the progress output showed each of the 48 pictures being added to the image. The second actually burned the CD. Note I stuck with the slow speed because an initial burn without the setting failed — my laptop only has USB 1.1. After the burn completed, I popped the disc out of the burner and into my internal DVD player, mounted it, fired up Kuickshow, and crossed my fingers.

Voila! All of the pictures had been burned successfully and were viewable with no problems. At the end of the day the Germans were almost as grateful for the digital memories as for the visit itself.

All thanks to the man.