Hello, a recent adopter here with some bugs to stomp. SuSE 11.1 w/KDE 4.3. It’s an oldie but goodie unit that’s been spiffed up somewhat over the years and is now as follows:
PIII 933mhz Intel D815EEA board with 512mb ram
500 gb IDE hd via PCI0680 Ultra ATA-133 Host Controller card
NEC DVD-RW ND 3540A and Pioneer DVD-RW 116D on original 2nd IDE channel
D-Link DFE-530TX+ 10/100 Ethernet network card
VIA Tech PCI USB card for USB 2.0 support
Dell 1440x900 LCD monitor
HP 932c parallel port printer
Standard keyboard, mouse
56k Modem
Floppy drive
This exact hardware configuration encountered no problems burning a DVD @ 16x via the Pioneer drive on a former Win 2k pro install and ‘GnomeBaker’ in Ubuntu linux also had no problems doing the same. It helps that I don’t have extra apps / processes running during burns, given the hardware. Trying to burn a data DVD-R with k3b however, k3b claims the drive and/or media can’t burn at 16x - which is, as confirmed by burning with same on 2k and Ubuntu, a rated speed both are capable of - and bumps the speed down to 4x. Moreover one sees a very unsteady behavior of the buffers on k3b’s progress window as it burns (at 4x or less). One attempt failed. Naturally I need to get stability back and I’d like to get the rated speed.
If this is software please move it, I really don’t know at this point if it’s soft or hardware related.
In the “old days” I’d have checked for something to do with DMA settings but nowadays with hdas gone to sdas, I gather that is not relevant so I’m at a loss…
I must admit, I’ve been having real troubles burning CDs and DVDs lately. I had been playing with my swap partition and also the /tmp folder.
I believe the problems came down to a full / partition (where /tmp was located).
I solved it by making a symlink for /tmp to my /home partition instead which had tons of free space.
For a DVD burn I believe you need well over the image size free in your assigned /tmp folder, ie a 4gig DVD will need more than 5 gigs!
Although that doesn’t explain the problems I had with CDs. I found that I could only successfully burn to re-writeable CDs, all others failed the check.
I guess in your case it might be a RAM issue, you don’t have /tmp assigned to RAM do you? I wouldn’t think so, just a wild guess.
I did that and it really messed things up!
Plus I’ve noticed rather slow disk performance under openSUSE 11.1 in general, and changing to a later kernel hasn’t fixed it.
Thanks for the ideas. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the problem; /tmp has 11 gigs free at minimum, home has over 200 and with “only” 512mb of ram I couldn’t assign tmp to it and try burning anything. The swap is ~512mb and has always had free room even when burning. hd speed seems ok on this unit. Odd about your disc speed… hope you can get it sorted.
A couple of things come to mind as for burning with K3B that I have found.
K3B Version 1.66 is still in alpha and it still has a few quirks. Try K3B for KDE3 instead (Version 1.0.5, I think) it’s more stable in my opinion (you will find it in the packman repo).
I had a PIII with similar spec’s to yours TeaSwigger. I found a weak power supply caused K3B to do much like you described. For a PIII or P4 try to stay at a 350 watt or better (I used a 500 watt in mine). Many older PC’s came with about a 250 Watt or so, and it’s not enough if you have done any serious upgrading.Today 600+ watts are easy to get.My PIII ran well under M$-Window$ with the smaller power supply,but I would still burn a bad disk at times.the new power supply solved the issue completely.
Thank you for the considered reply Lykopis. Unfortunately the RAM is maxed at 512mb (the PC turned 9yrs old last month) or I’d have sprung for more. But I keep an eye on it and it’s managing ok since I’m careful not to overtax it with too many / too heavy apps etc and fortunately, it has a gfx card with its own memory. Power supplies are often overlooked, but fortunately this unit has a robust supply for the time, rated 500w. It seems to be doing well. This same hardware was managing 16x DVD-R fine w/ubuntu right before I migrated to SuSE here.
Good thought re: k3b v3x vs v4x. I’ll go ahead and replace the 4x with 3x from the packman repos, test that and report back here.
Well: I know for those of us who came from windows it’s a little hard to explain, but I will try.
Burning under windows: I found a number of cd/dvd burning apps would lie about the real burning speed. But since you used Ubuntu with good results I doubt that’s your issue.
So: among those of us who have used Linux based OS’s ( Opensuse, Ubuntu, Mandriva and so forth) for a while we know that sometimes a distro just won’t work or something doesn’t work the way we need it too on a given PC. Since I have a small network I can attest to that. So might I suggest that since you had good luck with Ubuntu give Kubuntu a try, it’s Ubuntu with KDE, 9.04 uses KDE4.2 I think?? and it will look a lot like Opensuse with KDE. (in fact I can configure them to look identical). You might find it will do what you need. Also Ubuntu/Kubuntu tends to live on older hardware better than Opensuse.
If you just got to have Opensuse for some reason then I would snoop around the repo’s and try to find another burning app that will live on your hardware. (sorry I really can’t help much there)
Anyways good luck.
Thanks for the replies, j_xavier and Lykopis. Isn’t k3b just a “front end” though? If so why would it matter whether one used k3b, kfc or TrollToaster for a front end? SuSE has been working out pretty well. It’d be many hours of trouble (at least) to change distros now and odds are I’d just run into different issues with another so thought I’d try sorting this out. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be able to operate a DVD-R drive right. Just thought it’d be something to set right and all would be well…
b) install iotop and monitor during a burn for clues, then initiate a discussion on k3b mailing list.
Monitor what for what? Then join their discussions on their mailing list… Well that’s a thought I could poke at if need be though it sounds intimidatingly past end-user realm.
Hi, thanks for the interest. Here’s what came of that:
Name : k3b Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version : 1.0.5 Vendor: http://packman.links2linux.de
Release : 1.pm.19.20 Build Date: Thu 01 Oct 2009 07:38:33 PM PDT
Install Date: Fri 02 Oct 2009 01:08:06 AM PDT Build Host: pmbs
Group : Productivity/Multimedia/CD/Record Source RPM: k3b-1.0.5-1.pm.19.20.src.rpm
Size : 12235357 License: GPL v2 or later
Signature : DSA/SHA1, Thu 01 Oct 2009 07:41:42 PM PDT, Key ID f899f20d9a795806
Packager : Pascal Bleser <guru@unixtech.be>
URL : http://k3b.sourceforge.net/
Summary : Universal CD and DVD Burning Application
Description :
This package extends the opensuse package by some codecs.
K3b is a CD burning application that supports Ogg Vorbis, MP3 audio
files, DVD burning, CDDB, and much more.
Authors:
--------
Sebastian Trueg <trueg@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
Thomas Froescher <tfroescher@gmx.de>
Distribution: main / openSUSE_11.1_Update
Name : k3b-codecs Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version : 1.0.5 Vendor: http://packman.links2linux.de
Release : 1.pm.19.20 Build Date: Thu 01 Oct 2009 07:38:33 PM PDT
Install Date: Fri 02 Oct 2009 01:10:42 AM PDT Build Host: pmbs
Group : Productivity/Multimedia/CD/Record Source RPM: k3b-1.0.5-1.pm.19.20.src.rpm
Size : 191899 License: GPL v2 or later
Signature : DSA/SHA1, Thu 01 Oct 2009 07:41:42 PM PDT, Key ID f899f20d9a795806
Packager : Pascal Bleser <guru@unixtech.be>
URL : http://k3b.sourceforge.net/
Summary : MP3 Encoding and Video Decoding/Encoding Plugins
Description :
Some codecs, which are not provided by the openSUSE buildservice.
One may install the buildservice k3b package and add this codecs package.
K3b can be used to create mp3 files from audio CDs with this plugin. It
can also convert video codecs via ffmpeg.
Authors:
--------
Sebastian Trueg <trueg@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
Thomas Froescher <tfroescher@gmx.de>
Distribution: main / openSUSE_11.1_Update
Thanks for sticking with this. When opening in a terminal, besides listing the devices as expected (I reiterate they are both on the original secondary IDE channel and were working fine before) there is this, which I don’t know the relevance of so I’ll just post it in case:
kbuildsycoca running...
Reusing existing ksycoca
(K3bDevice::HalConnection) initializing HAL >= 0.5
Mapping udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_DVD_RW__DVR_116D to device /dev/sr1
Mapping udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_DVD_RW_ND_3540A to device /dev/sr0
/dev/sr0 resolved to /dev/sr0
/dev/sr0 is block device (0)
/dev/sr0 seems to be cdrom
bus: 2, id: 0, lun: 0
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: init()
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 feature: CD Mastering
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 feature: CD Track At Once
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 feature: CD-RW Media Write Support
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 feature: DVD Read (MMC5)
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 feature: DVD+R
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 feature: DVD+RW
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 feature: DVD+R Double Layer
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 feature: DVD-R/-RW Write
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 feature: Rigid Restricted Overwrite
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: dataLen: 60
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: checking for TAO
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: checking for SAO
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: checking for SAO_R96P
(K3bDevice::ScsiCommand) failed:
command: MODE SELECT (55)
errorcode: 70
sense key: ILLEGAL REQUEST (5)
asc: 26
ascq: 0
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: checking for SAO_R96R
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: checking for RAW_R16
(K3bDevice::ScsiCommand) failed:
command: MODE SELECT (55)
errorcode: 70
sense key: ILLEGAL REQUEST (5)
asc: 26
ascq: 0
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: checking for RAW_R96P
(K3bDevice::ScsiCommand) failed:
command: MODE SELECT (55)
errorcode: 70
sense key: ILLEGAL REQUEST (5)
asc: 26
ascq: 0
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: checking for RAW_R96R
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: GET PERFORMANCE dataLen = 104
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: GET PERFORMANCE successful with reported length: 100
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0: Number of supported write speeds via GET PERFORMANCE: 6
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 : 8467 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 : 7056 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 : 5645 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 : 4234 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 : 2822 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr0 : 1411 KB/s
(K3bDevice::DeviceManager) setting current write speed of device /dev/sr0 to 3324
/dev/sr1 resolved to /dev/sr1
/dev/sr1 is block device (1)
/dev/sr1 seems to be cdrom
bus: 2, id: 1, lun: 0
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: init()
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 feature: CD Mastering
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 feature: CD Track At Once
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 feature: CD-RW Media Write Support
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 feature: DVD Read (MMC5)
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 feature: DVD+R
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 feature: DVD+RW
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 feature: DVD+R Double Layer
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 feature: DVD-R/-RW Write
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 feature: Rigid Restricted Overwrite
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 feature: Layer Jump Recording
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: dataLen: 60
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: checking for TAO
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: checking for SAO
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: checking for SAO_R96P
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: checking for SAO_R96R
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: checking for RAW_R16
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: checking for RAW_R96P
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: checking for RAW_R96R
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: GET PERFORMANCE dataLen = 216
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: GET PERFORMANCE successful with reported length: 212
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1: Number of supported write speeds via GET PERFORMANCE: 13
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 27700 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 24930 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 22160 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 16620 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 13850 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 11080 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 8310 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 5540 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 4570 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 4155 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 3324 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 2770 KB/s
(K3bDevice::Device) /dev/sr1 : 1385 KB/s
(K3bDevice::DeviceManager) setting current write speed of device /dev/sr1 to 27700
/dev/sr0 resolved to /dev/sr0
(K3bDevice::DeviceManager) dev /dev/sr0 already found
/dev/sr1 resolved to /dev/sr1
(K3bDevice::DeviceManager) dev /dev/sr1 already found
(K3bDevice::DeviceManager) found config entry for devicetype: _NEC DVD_RW ND-3540A
(K3bDevice::DeviceManager) found config entry for devicetype: PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-116D
Both on the same cable often causes issues. It may be you have to get the jumper setting correct, one will be master and the other slave (I think). You may have to drop one altogether though.
I used to have 2 x IDE CD/DVD but not now, so I’m trawling back in the memory bank.
Hi, yes I’ve heard of people having problems with that. The weird thing being, in this case, that they were doing fine. Both were set “cable select” (and have always been) and were showing fine in the PC’s BIOS by the way.
I tried it with just the Pioneer connected. This time it did not report media couldn’t write at 16x, was more stable (software buffer was usually full, device buffer reported as between 40-90%) and speed topped at ~13x (same media and drive were doing ~16x though). Does that seem normal enough for k3b?
Sounds about right to me.
I guess you will have to work on trying different jumper settings. Remember it can be important which connection on the cable you give to Master and Slave.
