Las Campanas Observatory

How to Write a DVD on Linux PCs at LCO

David Osip
February 2006

DVD drives are available on the Linux PCs at the Magellan telescopes: Llama and Burro in the Baade Telescope control room, and Guanaco and Zorro in the Clay control room. These drives are also available on Linux PCs in the Swope and duPont telescope control rooms. Real world storage capacity is approximately 4.4 GB. These drives should accept both DVD- and DVD+ discs. A supply of blank discs should be available in each control room.

To write a DVD, put a blank disc in the DVD drive and when a graphic window pops up on the display with a title like "Burn" or "CD Writer", please close the window since we do NOT want to burn the disc with this Nautilus Tool. Instead, run the following commands in an xterm window.

cd /DATA/20070101_02

(or wherever your data happen to be)

du -sk /DATA/20070101_02

To confirm the disk space requirements for this data directory. If the disk space is greater than 4.4 GBytes, consider separating your data directory into smaller segements of no more than 4.4 GBytes each. In addition, you may consider gzipping the .fits files to reduce disk space requirements.

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/cdrom -R -J -V "Disc_Name" /DATA/20070101_02

Writes the directory (and subdirectory structure within) 20070101_02 to the DVD directly. There may be a few filename conversion errors scrolling past on the screen (these are only pointed out as non standard ISO names, however, the data files on disc will retain their full proper names... that is why the -R and -J keywords were employed above). Following these scrolled messages, there should be a live update of the disc burning status measured in both % complete and time remaining. A complete DVD should finish in about 15 minutes.

Once the disc has been written, you can check the contents by mounting it with the command "mount /dev/cdrom" and change directory to "cd /mnt/cdrom".