Hints about installing a CD burner on the parallel port???

[mandja_s_grozde]

can someone tell me how a removable CD burner can be installed on the parallel port? I have read some forum pages about ZIPs and so on, but they were for other distros (I am running Mandrake 8.2 Bluebird) and that didn't help me a lot .... so which files I have to modify and how?

PS sorry, I should have mentioned this ... I have a notebook, so I can use only external CD burners and the upgrade to a combo drive is too expensive

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

I'm not sure what exactly you'd need to do, but here's some theory:

Parport IDE: Makes the machine think it's an IDE device running from the parallel port.

SCSI emulation: Makes the machine think an IDE drive is really a SCSI drive.

Regular IDE CDR drives have to have SCSI emulation enabled in the kernel for them to work. I would think that a Parallel port CD writer would have to work as Parport IDE, and then have SCSI emulation enabled on it.

This post is really just to point you in the right direction, though. I've never actually used a parallel port CD burner under Linux. I'd assume it would be slow as molasses, though...

[dunbar]

Parallel port burning is a topic I've seen before (for Windows stuff), it is generally regarded as 'do not do this'; hope it works in Linux better than it does in Windows. I only use internal drives. And, for what it's worth, I'd bet that the actual drive inside the external box is actually an IDE drive with an interface card.

From what I've read, cavnars post is right on the money.

[cyberhwk]

I bought a cheap usb burner that works great. its an hp and its a 4 speed burn. because it is such a slow burn people try to unload them:D