Burn ISO’s to CD with cdrecord
You can’t simply cp a CD image onto a new disk. For this task, you need the cdrecord program.
In the old command-line days, about the only way to write a CD-ROM on a Linux system was to know the set of commands that build an ISO filesystem and then copy it to a CD. Today, with the availability of GUI-based CD creation programs such as K3B, the old command-line method is pretty much forgotten.
Those GUIs are fine for building a CD from ordinary files stored on your hard disk–text, data, music and such–but sometimes you need to do the equivalent of copying a CD image onto a new CD. A common occurrence of this is with a Linux distribution. For example, Knoppix is distributed in this manner, as is the SuSE Live Evaluation.
You might think that using cp or dd would do the trick in this situation. After all, to us UNIX people, a file is a file. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with creating CDs, because you can’t simply write bits to the CD and be home free.
Fortunately, there is a program that understands how to deal with writing CDs like this and isolates you from most of the pain. The program is cdrecord, and most GUI-based CD creation programs actually use cdrecord to do the actual writing.
