O.T. FTP upload

[Arne Vajhøj]

Amen. Questions should be answered in general, not just tuned for
the OP, me in this particular case. This is not a help desk. It is a
discussion meant for a wide audience.

When OPs complain they are given information they already know or that
is not specifically germane to their case, I have to refrain myself
from smacking them with some comment that reminds them they are not
the only centre of the universe.

Extra information with an answer is nice, because it helps
other people than OP.

But extra information without an answer is bad, because
it confuses both OP and other people.

Arne

 

[Martin Gregorie]

Two points:
- How is that "cruft"?

Because Roedy, IIRC, used Windows and has little *nix experience. Viewed
in the context of a Windows power user with little *nix experience, all
the stuff you or I would regard as essentials, namely a *nix shell (does
Cygwin include sh, ash, ksh or all three) and the Core Utils, can fairly
be described as cruft.

YMMV.

Indeed, and it does. I've never had much time for Windows and less for
the DOS command line interpreter. Consequently, in the mid 80s I switched
to Microware's OS/9 (a highly modular, multi-user real-time OS with an
optional Bourne-style shell) because, at that time there was no unix
clone available that was half as capable or nearly as affordable). I
moved on to Linux in about 1998 (RedHat 6.2) but my OS/9 system still
runs my accounting system and is fired up several times each week. The OS
I use (V2.4) runs on an MC 68020. It and its utilities haven't been
patched (or needed to be patched) since about 1992 except for tweaks we
all did to the clock driver in 1998 in preparation for Y2K.

 

[Roedy Green]

Because Roedy, IIRC, used Windows and has little *nix experience. Viewed
in the context of a Windows power user with little *nix experience, all
the stuff you or I would regard as essentials, namely a *nix shell (does
Cygwin include sh, ash, ksh or all three) and the Core Utils, can fairly
be described as cruft.

I am almost there. I am gradually documenting how to make this work
step-by-step for newbies. I have created an MkIsoFS image so far.
I am wading through the 54 pages of options on cdRecord.

See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/cygwin.html
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/cdburning.html
http://mindprod.com/application/backuptozip.manual.html

if you want to kibitz

It all makes much more sense than the last time I fiddled with Cygwin.

The nice thing about this is when I am done I will have a Linux and
Mac solution too.


--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
Capitalism has spurred the competition that makes CPUs faster and
faster each year, but the focus on money makes software manufacturers
do some peculiar things like deliberately leaving bugs and deficiencies
in the software so they can soak the customers for upgrades later.
Whether software is easy to use, or never loses data, when the company
has a near monopoly, is almost irrelevant to profits, and therefore
ignored. The manufacturer focuses on cheap gimicks like dancing paper
clips to dazzle naive first-time buyers. The needs of existing
experienced users are almost irrelevant. I see software rental as the
best remedy.

 

[Roedy Green]

I am almost there. I am gradually documenting how to make this work
step-by-step for newbies. I have created an MkIsoFS image so far.
I am wading through the 54 pages of options on cdRecord.

I have tried combination after combination. The utilites run to
completion but the final disk is "corrupted". I thought of two more
things to try.
You can see my latest scripts at
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/cdrtools.html
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
Capitalism has spurred the competition that makes CPUs faster and
faster each year, but the focus on money makes software manufacturers
do some peculiar things like deliberately leaving bugs and deficiencies
in the software so they can soak the customers for upgrades later.
Whether software is easy to use, or never loses data, when the company
has a near monopoly, is almost irrelevant to profits, and therefore
ignored. The manufacturer focuses on cheap gimicks like dancing paper
clips to dazzle naive first-time buyers. The needs of existing
experienced users are almost irrelevant. I see software rental as the
best remedy.

 

[Andreas Leitgeb]

I have tried combination after combination. The utilites run to
completion but the final disk is "corrupted". I thought of two more
things to try.
You can see my latest scripts at
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/cdrtools.html

I find the "mkisofs -J -input-charset UTF-8" suspicious.

Windows has its own philosophy about filename-encoding, that
is different from unix's. I do not know very much about the
windows-way, but I'm very sure, that it isn't UTF-8 *there*.

If you want further help (without wasting piles of disks),
create an iso of a couple of small files (with international
names).
Then either find some software for windows that lets you mount
an iso-file as if it were a CDROM, or move it to a linux machine,
and loopback-mount it there (sudo mount -oloop file.iso /mnt).
If the iso is small enough and doesn't contain private things,
you could upload it to a server and have it examined by others.

That should help you find out, if the ISO-generation or the
burning causes problems...

 

[Roedy Green]

I find the "mkisofs -J -input-charset UTF-8" suspicious.

Thanks. I was foolishly staring at cdrecord as the likely culprit.

I asked the author if he could see what I was doing wrong.

I wrote to him saying:

I have written an essay on CdrTools mkisofs and cdrecord. I asked on
newsgroups for the best unattended burning software and they pointed me
to you.

Cdrtools struck me as needing a how-to for non-geeks to let technical
but not advanced technical Windows users employ it. So I wrote one.

The catch is, I can't get it to work. All appears to go fine, but the
final disk is always corrupt. I can burn with Nero and UDF copy fine.
I have spend many days trying variant after variant on the switches.
I wonder if :

1. you might have a look and see if I am doing something obvious wrong.
2. see if the essay is correct.

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/cdrtools.html

he responded:

I am not sure if someone gets help from this text.....

It does not help me and it does not help you as it mentions meny
things except
those information that could help you...... you did not even explain
_what_
problems you have. How do you expect me to be able to help you?


You did not send something that is a useful butreport and you did not
even
verify that you did not accitentially call the defective cdrtools fork
that is
shipped by redhad.

I recommend you to read the man pages for cdrtools and to follow the
instructions and to try out the examples. They are expected to work.

You did call mkisofs and cdrecord with options that are for
experienced people
who exactly know what they are doing when they like to overwrite
correct
default behavior.

Forcing cdrecord to use the wrong device driver may have any result
including
purple smoke.

Forcing mkisofs to asume a spceific character encoding on a
non-standard
platform may cause rubbish filenames to be created.

Why do you use these strange options instead of following the man
pages?

Jörg

Between the two of you, I have more options to try.

 

[Andreas Leitgeb]

I find the "mkisofs -J -input-charset UTF-8" suspicious.

Thanks. I was foolishly staring at cdrecord as the likely culprit.

I asked the author if he could see what I was doing wrong.
[...]
he responded:
[...]
I recommend you to read the man pages for cdrtools and to follow the
instructions and to try out the examples. They are expected to work.

That indeed does sound like good advice.

Jörg

Between the two of you, I have more options to try.

I'd follow Jörg's advice about trying *less* options, rather than
more ;-)

Perhaps try cdrecord first with ISO images downloaded from web.
If you get readable CDs from those, then you can safely focus
on mkisofs' options for the culprit of your problem.


PS: I had a rather longish discussion with Jörg Schilling (on at.linux
in German language) a while ago. It was about a bug in cdrecord
on a linux machine, which he refused to acknowledge. (this is my
shortened version of the story, anyway - his version might differ)

 

[Roedy Green]

I find the "mkisofs -J -input-charset UTF-8" suspicious.

bingo. I will add a few more notes to the essay. The "trick" in
having sufficient free disk space. I assumed I did because other
backups did, but they don't build an entire ISO image on disk first.
They create just an track of it at a time.