Quick start NeroLINUX Nero AG
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Table of Contents 1 Preparing to use of NeroLINUX ........................................................ 5 1.1 1.2 1.3 2 System configuration ........................................................................ 7 2.1 2.1.1 2.1.2 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2 2.2.3 2.2.4 2.2.5 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2 2.3.3 2.3.4 2.3.5 2.4 2.4.1 2.4.2 3 Linux kernel version ........................................................................ 7 Linux kernel version explanations ......................................................
3.9.1 3.9.2 3.9.3 4 Advanced functions......................................................................... 31 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.4.1 4.4.2 5 Creating a bootable CD or DVD .................................................... 31 The concept of Precaching ........................................................... 32 Track to file conversion ................................................................. 32 Adding a new file type to the NeroLINUX file types registry...... 33 Specifying the decoder...
1 Preparing to use of NeroLINUX 1.1 Software Requirements NeroLINUX has all the necessary functionality for recording CDs and DVDs builtin. However, for some special features NeroLINUX relies on some additional programs and packages installed on your system: The mpg123 software MPEG1-LayerIII decoder is used to allow recording of MP3 files on CD as regular audio tracks. Additionally, Gogo’n’Coda can be used to encode MP3 files.
on your hard drive. To make this possible, you need at least 700MB of free hard drive space. 1.3 Installing NeroLINUX NeroLINUX is packaged in the RPM and Debian format. These formats are used by the majority of the Linux distributions. Please make sure you have administrative rights on your system before installing NeroLINUX. To install NeroLINUX, open a terminal, go where your package is located and type the following command: rpm -i nerolinux--.
2 System configuration Before using NeroLINUX you need to make sure that your system is correctly configured. Please read the following instructions very carefully to make sure that the first disc you record will be successful. This chapter provides also some information about the way the Linux kernel internally handles CD and DVD recorders, and how NeroLINUX handles them.
2.1.2 NeroLINUX requirements In order to use NeroLINUX you will need at least a 2.4 kernel. To be plainly usable, especially with high-speed recorders like DVD recorders, a 2.6 kernel is highly recommended. 2.2 Devices configuration Under Linux, all the devices are associated to one or more specific file(s) called device file. All the device files that are available on your machine are located inside the /dev directory.
Sometimes, depending on your kernel configuration, one of these files can be unavailable. In order to have both, you should make sure that your kernel is configured with the following options: CONFIG_SCSI (SCSI support) CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SR (SCSI CD-ROM support : provides /dev/scdX) CONFIG_CHR_DEV_SG (SCSI generic support : provides /dev/sgX) Usually all distributions are shipping a kernel configured with these options, so no need to worry.
For Red Hat Linux run ksconfig (This application is called ‘Kickstart Configurator’). When the application is running, click on ‘Boot Loader Options’ and fill the ‘Kernel Parameters’ field. For SuSE Linux, run YaST2, select System in the left pane and then double click on Boot Loader Configuration. Once the module is launched, click on Edit Configuration Files to set up the device parameters. 2.2.3 IDE Devices configuration with 2.6 kernels 2.2.3.1 Major changes in the device drivers With 2.
Another possibility, if you only want to give access to some users, is to create a new group called for example nero and change the group of the device files corresponding to your CD/DVD devices with it. Then give read/write permission to the group on these device files and finally, just add all the users that are allowed to use NeroLINUX to the new-created group. 2.2.4.2 Udev support NeroLINUX supports udev, the new /dev file system implementation that are used in SuSE Linux 9.
2.3 3rd Party System Tools Configuration Some 3rd party system tools, like automounter utilities or new hardware detection daemons, can cause side effects when using NeroLINUX. As you have no way under Linux to lock a disc drive, these utilities can send commands to a drive when NeroLINUX is burning. In that case it can make your recording process fail. Before using NeroLINUX, you must make sure that no other application is accessing the drive you plan to use for recording.
2.3.3 KDE CD Player The KDE CD Player applet (also known as kscd) is also polling the drive it is connected to. Make sure that this utility is not configured to use your recorder. To do this, open the configuration dialog and check that the CD-ROM device prompted is not your recorder. 2.3.4 Magicdev Magicdev is an automounter utility included in the GNOME desktop utilities, that polls every disc drives to see if they contain a useable medium. If it is the case, it will automatically be mounted.
In some case, the magicdev process can still be running even if everything above is unchecked. In that case, you can safely ignore NeroLINUX warning message. 2.3.5 KDE Autorun daemon Autorun is a daemon that is sometimes included in KDE. Make sure that it is not configured to run with your active recorder before burning with NeroLINUX otherwise you could get into troubles when burning discs. To completely remove this daemon, just delete the ‘Autorun.desktop’ file in your ‘.kde/Autostart’ directory.
2.4 Configuring NeroLINUX 2.4.1 Initial Setup and Quick Start Start NeroLINUX from the account you are planning to run it in the future by typing nero on a terminal. If you have not set up your system for write access of users to the CD-Recorder device, you will have to use the root account. Please be aware that this is a potential security problem on your system. Please, see the previous sections and the FAQ for ideas on how to make your CD-Recorder accessible to normal users.
3 Basic functionality and Interface concept Once you have setup NeroLINUX and the system it is running on, you will be able to record your first CD-R/RW or DVD/RW with NeroLINUX. However you should first test if everything is working. If you are using NeroLINUX with a CDR/RW recorder, insert a blank rewriteable media and select 'Erase Rewritable Disc' in the ‘Recorder’ menu. The following window should pops up.
The following is a guide to the lower section of NeroLINUX's main window. The first icon leads to a file manager which displays a virtual file system. Editing this file system (e.g. adding files, deleting files, creating directories) will not affect any file system or directory of your computer directly. What you are editing in NeroLINUX's File system editor is just a prototype of a hypothetical data track on the disc you want to create. The second icon brings up NeroLINUX's track editor.
By clicking the second last icon you can reach a page with various recorder settings. You can use this page to adjust your recording settings to your needs, e.g. you can set the recorder speed, the type of lead-out you want to write, whether or not your CD should be bootable. With the last icon you can reach the recording terminal page. This page contains a list of all messages coming from your devices, in order to keep you informed of what they are actually doing and their result.
Expanding 'Disc Drives' will show a list representing the disc based units installed on your system. Clicking one of the drives will show a list of tracks of the medium in that particular drive. Clicking 'Filesystems' will show the available file systems available for recording to the CD/DVD.
Generally, you can drag and drop any item showing up in the upper half of the NeroLINUX window into both the track editor and the file system editor of the lower half, with different results of course. That is also how you will create your CD-R/RW or DVD/RW. Everything that is to appear as a separate track when the disc is inserted into your home stereo must be dragged into the track list, everything that should appear in the file system of NeroLINUX must be dragged and dropped into the file system editor.
If you select the root item of the file system editor's file tree and select rename, you can set your data track's Volume ID. Please, make sure your file system is part of NeroLINUX's destination track list. The 'NeroLINUX File system' located in the 'Filesystems' folder in NeroLINUX's source area is the track-representation of the virtual file system you just edited. The ISO file system is added to the track list automatically if it is empty when you start editing the virtual file system.
3.4 Audio CD recording (Creating CDs playable on your Home Stereo from other CDs, MP3, WAV etc.) NeroLINUX provides two general methods for creating an audio track: you can build it from a file or taking an existing audio track from another CD. If wish to build the audio track from a file, all you need to do is to select the audio file you want to record from NeroLINUX's file system tree and drag and drop it down into the track list (the pane connected to the second icon in the destination area).
You can also freely combine audio tracks coming from another CD and tracks created from MP3 files as you desire. You can rearrange the tracks in NeroLINUX's track list to make the playing order more interesting. To do so, drag the tracks around in the list and place them in your preferred order. The tracks are always inserted into the track list at the point where you release your mouse button.
3.5 Recording Modes in NeroLINUX : How to use NeroLINUX for Disc-At-Once recording The Disc-At-Once mode is the most elaborate recording mode for Audio-CDs. Only in Disc-At-Once mode is it possible to record CD-TEXT as well as CDs not containing a gap of 2 seconds between your audio tracks. Track-At-Once is the mode of choice for data CD Mastering. It allows multisession discs to be created and works with a huge quantity of recorders, even the very old ones.
The process of creating a CD EXTRA or a Mixed Mode CD with NeroLINUX is a mere combination of the steps described in Section 3.1 “Making a CD or DVD from files stored on your computer's ” and Section 3.4 ”Audio CD recording (Creating CDs playable on your Home Stereo from other CDs, MP3, WAV etc.)”. Remember, the data track edited in NeroLINUX's file system editor can be found in the 'Filesystems' section of the source area. Add the audio tracks you need to the track list.
3.7 How to copy a CD or a DVD To copy a CD or a DVD using NeroLINUX, make sure that your recording options are correctly set and then click on the ‘Copy’ button in the toolbar or select the ‘Copy Disc…’ item in the ‘Recorder’ menu. The following window appears : On this window you can find different panes that let you set up your copy parameters: On the first one, you can select the temporary image parameters. This image will be used when you do not want to copy a media on the fly.
A full blank means that all data on your medium will be erased. Depending on your recorder’s speed this can take as long as your disc's maximum playing time. A TOC only will fool the recorder into seeing a blank medium when really just the first few sectors are blank. Clearing a disc this way is takes less than a minute with modern recorders.
3.9 Managing multisession discs The following section will explain how to create multisession discs. 3.9.1 A introduction to how Multisession is done in general When the first CD-ROMs were released, there were no CD-Recorders and there was no way to alter the contents of a written CD. There was no way to append files to backups done with the CD-Recorder, even though there was visibly more space on the disc.
As soon as you have chosen the session you want to import, click on ‘OK’. After a few seconds the contents of the imported session should appear within the file system editor. Note, that all files from the previous session are marked in blue in order to distinguish them from files from the session currently being edited.
You can replace files from the previous session, in which case their color will change to black or you can rename or delete files from the previous session. When you are finished editing, click on record. You can repeat this process until all available space on your disc has been consumed if you leave the ‘Finalize disc’ option unchecked. Be aware that every session on a disc will require approximately 15 MB of additional space for the lead-out stored separately for every session.
4 Advanced functions 4.1 Creating a bootable CD or DVD Bootable media according to the El-Torito standard is the standard for creating bootable discs for standard PCs. Using the floppy emulation mode, your PCs BIOS provides some basic CD-ROM access functions that can read out an image file of a bootable floppy disc stored on your disc. Using this image, your BIOS will transparently emulate a normal floppy disc in this mode of operation, e.g.
Note, that you do not need NeroLINUX’s bootable media creation capabilities in order to make a disc image bootable. Those images are either bootable out of their own right or they are not. See Section 3.3, ”Making an image bootable” for further information. 4.
convert down to the Track Editor. This will convert them into tracks. Just follow the steps above to convert to whatever file type you want. 4.4 Adding a new file type to the NeroLINUX file types registry NeroLINUX supports a very versatile way of burning arbitrary (mostly audio) file types to a CD or DVD. All you need to do to let NeroLINUX make an audio track out of an audio file is to specify a command line program capable of converting files of the desired type into some raw 16Bit, 44.
4.4.1 Specifying the decoder This first point splits up into some basic information about the type of data your decoder plug-in will deliver and what NeroLINUX is to make of it. First, is the Track Type: It can be one of data or audio and will tell NeroLINUX which type of track it is to create. The PC flag specifies whether NeroLINUX is to precache files of this type prior to burning.
the filename replaced by '$file'. Do not forget to include the quotation marks as well. These are required in case the filename of your file contains spaces. You must then parse the output of your program. Apart from a few mathematical functions like abs, int, sqrt, sin, cos, tan and C-Style boolean operators, NeroLINUX supports two powerful ways of retrieving your command line tool's output: getpos(y,x) regexp(' regular expression' ).
Note that each of the specified time fragments is being put into brackets once.
5 Frequently asked Questions Some things just cannot be covered in the standard documentation. Unfortunately the documentation is the last place the average user looks for a solution to their problems. Here you can find answers to some FAQ's or Frequently asked Questions about NeroLINUX 5.
5.3 When copying audio tracks from other CDs, I get nothing but silence or the tracks seem to be incomplete See question “When writing audio files, I get a lot of silence at the end of the track or I get tracks that consist of nothing but silence” for possible reasons for this behavior. 5.4 I can't write multisession discs Please follow the instructions of the “Managing multisession discs” section in the NeroLINUX manual. 5.
5.8 NeroLINUX seems to be notoriously trying to open a network connection to some server. Does it have some sort of built-in Trojan transmitting my data to some remote database? This is just the freedb routine trying to identify the CDs in your disc drives. You can deactivate this routine in the preferences dialog of NeroLINUX. 5.9 I tried to burn a disc with a few files on it. When I clicked on record, NeroLINUX went through all the files and recorded them onto the disc.
5.12 My external USB/FireWire recorder hangs when recording a disc This is due to the USB/FireWire driver controlling your device. Updating your kernel should solve your problem. You can have a look to your Linux documentation for more details about kernel updates. 5.13 My USB recorder hides another device when it is plugged in This is due to the kernel USB mass storage driver that is buggy. Updating your kernel should solve your problem.
6 Support Useful links Nero AG Homepage Online Shopping Updates NeroLINUX Support • 41
7 Glossary Buffer underrun To burn a CD, there must be a continuous flow of data. If the data stream between the computer and the recorder is so small that its internal buffer is empty, the writing process is interrupted, as there is no data available to write to the CD. CD-Text As well as audio data, there is space on the CD for a wide variety of additional information, such as text describing the title and artist on each track. Currently very few audio CD players have a CD text function.
programs which can access animations and video and audio sequences. Usually special players with television screens are used to play CD-i media. DAE DAE is the acronym for Digital Audio Extraction. This means that the music tracks on audio CDs are read in digital format. This is also referred to as audio grabbing. Not all CD-ROM drives can read music in digital format. Generally, CD-ROM drives read music tracks in analog format (via the sound card).
Currently the following types of DVD are available: DVD-Audio: A high capacity audio medium. DVD-R: DVD-Rs can store between 3.95, 4.7 and 9.4 GB of data. In order to store 9.4 GB, you must use the second side of the DVD-R which means that you have to turn it over. DVD-RAM: This is a rewritable medium which can store either 2.6 GB (one layer) or 5.2 GB (two layers) of data. DVD-ROM: This is the data medium.
Firmware The firmware in recorders (CD/DVD-ROM drives) functions as the operating system of the drive and contains instructions which determine how the drive reacts to commands from the computer. The firmware of the latest recorders can generally be upgraded. For example, Nero AG's website contains a page with links to the latest firmware versions. To see the firmware version of your drive, use the ‘Choose Recorder’ item on the Recorder menu in NeroLINUX.
Lead-out This is an area at the end of each session which is written at the same time as the lead-in. m3u playlist An m3u file contains a list of MP3 file paths. An m3u file can be created, for example, by NeroMIX or WinAmp. Mixed mode CDs A mixed mode CD has one initial data track followed by audio tracks. This usually means that audio CD players cannot process the first track.
after the great fire in Rome in 64 A.D. threw suspicion for having started it on the Christians. The suspicion that Nero himself started the fire cannot be proved, but it indicates what his citizens thought he was capable of. However, there was no real systematic persecution of Christians, since the events which took place were restricted to the city of Rome. After the failure of plot against Nero hatched in the Senate and lead by Piso, repression increased.
Track On an audio CD a track corresponds to a piece of music. On a data CD a track is a unit of data which joins consecutive sectors together. Track-at-Once This is a method of writing data which is used for multisession CDs. The CD-RW drive writes all the tracks one after another and does not end the session until this is finished. UDF (Universal Disk Format) This is a file system developed by OSTA (the Optical Storage Technology Association).
Yellow Book The Yellow Book is the standard for the format of CDs used for data storage. As the data must not contain any errors, additional error correction data is included. This additional error recognition and correction data is included in Mode 1. In Mode 2 this information is not included and therefore this mode is only suitable for less error-prone data such as the video files on Video CDs.
