technomage wrote:
> any idea which brands of cd-rw drive are supported 
> in linux?

The Yamaha 'LightSpeed' drives work real well. I have a 16x Yamaha burner and 
end up 'abusing' it by using it as a CDROM reader and audio ripper also. No 
other drive I've used comes anywhere near as fast as a reader, regardless of 
specs. The 24x Yamaha's have been out for quite a while now although I seldom 
run mine at its' max speed when burning. (It burns just fine at max speed though)

One word of warning : Do not put your burner on the same IDE chain as the hard 
drive that you intend to hold your ISO files on. The cdrom drive may slow the 
performance of the HD. Trying to do a burn from one device to the other on the 
same IDE port won't work nearly as well either since IDE doesn't handle 
concurrent operations well....

My workstation has two HDs on the primary IDE controller, the Yamaha and a 
DVDROM on the secondary IDE controller. I never try to do copies directly from 
  CD to CDROM. I always put an ISO on the hard drive first and then burn from 
there.

-- 
Kevin O'Connor

  "People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun ...

The GNU Manifesto - Copyright (C) 1985, 1993 Free Software Foundation, Inc.