This section briefly lists a few of the many applications
related to CD-ROM that are available under Linux. Check the Linux
Software Map for the latest versions and archive sites.
Several programs are available for playing audio CDs,
either through a headphone jack or an attached sound card.
Workman
a graphical player running under X11 and supporting
a CD database and many other features
WorkBone
an interactive text-mode player
xcdplayer
a simple X11 based player
cdplayer
a very simple command line based player
Xmcd
an X11/Motif based player
xmitsumi
another X11 based player for Mitsumi drives
xplaycd
another X11 based player, bundled with sound mixer
and VU meter programs
cdtool
command line tools for playing audio CDs
Some of these programs are coded to use a specific device file for the
CD-ROM (e.g. /dev/cdrom). You may be able to pass the correct
device name as a parameter, or you can create a symbolic link in the
/dev directory. If sending the CD output to a sound card, you
may wish to use a mixer program to set volume settings or select the
CD-ROM input for recording.
PhotoCDs use an ISO-9660 file system containing image files
in a proprietary format. Not all CD-ROM drives support reading
PhotoCDs.
The hpcdtoppm program by Hadmut Danisch converts PhotoCD
files to the portable pixmap format. It can be obtained from
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/hpcdtoppm or as part of the PBM
(portable bit map) utilities, available on many archive sites (look
for "pbm" or "netpbm").
The photocd program by Gerd Knorr (
kraxel@cs.tu-berlin.de)
can convert PhotoCD images into Targa or Windows and OS/2 bitmap
files.
The same author has written the program xpcd, an X11-based
program for handling PhotoCD images. You can select the images with a
mouse, preview the image in a small window, and load the image with
any of the five possible resolutions. You can also mark a part of the
Image and load only the selected part. Look for these packages at
ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/linux/Local/misc/.
Eric Youngdale's mkisofs package allows creating an ISO-9660
file system on a hard disk partition. This can then be used to assist
in creating and testing CD-ROM file systems before mastering discs.
The tools for actually writing data to writable CD-ROM
drives tend to be vendor specific. They also require writing the
data with no interruptions, so a multitasking operating system like
Linux is not particularly well suited.
These are some utilities for verifying the format of ISO-9660
formatted discs; you may find them useful for testing suspect CDs. The
package can be found at
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/unixfreeware/archive/. They were
written by Bill Siegmund and Rich Morin.
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