About a week ago I reported that I was having trouble
with my system hanging flat at the end of trying to
blank a CD-RW disk. That problem has been fixed.

Since I inquired, I installed the lastest cdrtools
(cdrecord, mkisofs, etc.). In the process I also made
sure the permissions and ownerships on the imitation
SCSI devices are correct.

It's possible (even likely) that I ran into trouble
when I last updated the operating system (to Red Hat
7.1), and that doing that overwrote the existing
drivers with new permissions and ownerships, which in
turn horsed up my ability to blank CDs.

In any case, it works once again, but I wanted to pass
along a warning about an interesting phenomenon.

Someone had recommended xcdroast. I'd brought it up
once before for about 30 seconds to look at it. Didn't
really need it, since I've written all my own scripts
to do backups, burn audio CDs, etc.

However, I decided maybe I'll upgrade that package and
take a serious look at it. (This was before I'd gotten
my burner to stop hanging the system.) The RPM on the
system was 0.98alpha8, I believe, and there is an
alpha9. Did I really need to update this? According to
the blurb on FreshMeat, this contained a bunch of bug
fixes, and was probably worth getting.

So I deleted the alpha8 RPM, downloaded the source
bundle, and built it from scratch. The instructions
then said: 'Now you need to install cdtools-1.10. Oh,
okay. I had 1.9 on the system, so that's when I went
out and saw that there is now a 1.11a17 available, so I
assumed: Great! Better yet.

Bzzzt! Wrong! After installing the latest xcdtools,
thinking everything was set to roll, I started
xcdroast. (It must be run as root the first time to
initialize the configuration table.) I get this
message as a reward for my effort:

** WARNING **: Invalid cdrecord version 1.11a17 found. Expecting version 1.10

Can you believe that? 

Doesn't matter ... I never used xcdroast before, and
guess I can get along with it now. Obviously I'm *not*
going to downgrade my cdrtools. Eventually maybe the
author of xcdroast will catch up.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ