Cdrkit contains all gpl code, whereas cdrtools is now a mix of gpl and cddl. This makes redistribution of cdrtools of questionable legality. Cdrkit is usable by non-root users without being suid root, provided the user has write permission to the device file in question.
Cdrecord must be used by the root user or installed suid root, which is a possible security risk. This is not a big issue for Puppy, which runs as root by default. However, for Grafpup it is a major issue.
Cdrecord spits out a bunch of messages at you saying that there are unsettled issues with Linux-2.6. It encourages you to use Linux-2.4 or try Solaris. Wodim, the corresponding binary in Cdrkit, does not nag the user but instead attempts to resolve the "unsettled" issues.
Wodim has some unique features. In addition to the -scanbus option which it inherited from cdrecord, it recognizes a new command --devices, which returns a much more readable and easy to parse listing of the optical drives on the system. This makes it quite a bit easier to design a program which uses wodim to scan for cd devices than it is with cdrecord, especially in light of the fact that cdrecord's -scanbus action returns a different syntax in recent versions.
In addition to Icedax (which is equivelent to cdda2wav) cdrkit contains executables to rip songs directly to mp3 and ogg format off an audio cd. The cdda2ogg script does require oggenc, however.
I have checked on the command line that if the cdrkit executables are installed with symlinks named for their cdrtools counterparts, then they can be invoked successfully as the old programs. For instance, point a link from wodim to cdrecord and you can invoke wodim as cdrecord. This should mean that if we move to cdrkit then all the old frontends should still work.
On Barry's news blog a while back he mentioned he had tried upgrading cdrtools but reverted i back, mainly because of the issue with the -scanbus output being changed. To encourage the switch I wrote a new cdburner-wizard using gtkdialog, which uses wodim to list the optical devices rather than parsing the output from probedisk. This "should" be more reliable, and proved very easy to do relatively speaking. It is definately better looking. I've included the new wizard in this package. There may still be problems with burniso2cd, however, as it uses cdrecord -scanbus to find drives. I would mention that Grafburn can be invoked like this to burn an iso image:
Code: Select all
grafburn -b
I would like to make a case for including cdrkit rather than cdrtools in future releases of Puppy, as I think it is better software for our purposes at this point.
Here's the package: cdrkit-1.1.6.pet
Be warned the package WILL overwrite the binaries cdrecord, mkisofs, and cdda2wav if they are installed on your system (the former two will be for almost every version of Puppy). If you are running with the live cd, frugal install, or usb install then you can get them back by uninstalling cdrkit.
Nathan