Done pounding my head against it

[torquill]

It's a good thing that I found a program that will let me burn CDs in Ubuntu... and that it's not related to cdrecord.

cdrecord won't work with Debian-based distros these days, you see. There's a Debian fork of it called cdrkit, with a component called "wodim"... I did finally find a package for that. It conflicts with the package for cdrecord. That was actually kind of expected; all I needed to do was uninstall cdrecord first. But I didn't. Why?

Because apt-get, when asked to uninstall cdrecord, wants to uninstall three other packages that are "no longer needed". The list: cdrecord, k3b, nautilus-cd-burner, ubuntu-desktop.

ubuntu-desktop? Christ. I don't know how essential it actually is, but it seems pretty damned important to me, and I'm not going to remove any package that firmly suggests you not uninstall it if you want your system to continue to function. Not to mention the fact that it can get along just fine without cdrecord. (As can the other two, given a replacement burning program.)

Both Synaptic and apt-get insist on bundling these four together, with no obvious means of separating them. Sigh.

On the plus side, Gnomebaker created a perfectly sound mp3 CD with very little hassle. I can finally burn CDs again!

Comments

[foogod.livejournal.com]

You can manually remove the package by itself without removing the others using dpkg (there might be an apt option for it too, I'm not sure, but dpkg will definitely do it).. Then you should be able to install the new one with apt-get and everything should be happy.

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

I think I may try doing it with dpkg, as I've found the options I need (mostly just something to turn dependency problems into warnings).

The answer I got on the forums, however, was that ubuntu-desktop is just a meta-package, and can be removed without any trouble. A little digging has turned up other comments to the effect that ubuntu-desktop has to be removed before taking out anything else under it. *shrug* apparently the dire warnings in the package info were a bit misplaced.

[foogod.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I forgot to mention that ubuntu-desktop is just a meta-package and removing it won't actually get rid of anything in your system. Mainly I was thinking it'd be easier not to have to remove K3B, etc, and then try to re-install them (and fight with the depenencies on re-installing)..

I'm assuming that this will all be easier in later Ubuntu distributions (I keep meaning to take a look at Feisty)..

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

apt bitched so fiercely about broken dependencies (it's so much less tolerant than rpm) that I did finally uninstall the other three. I spent a while with k3b after that: unpacking it, modifying the config file to move cdrecord from "required" to "recommended", and rebuilding it. The resulting hack did install okay, then it complained about not finding the "cdrecord" command. A symlink made it happy again, since wodim has the same command set. Yay bodge jobs.

It turns out that wodim throws the same error the old cdrecord did, back when I was first tracking all this down (error 255), and says it can't work the SCSI driver... so I'm back where I was in April or so, with k3b aborting with an error. I'd be a lot more frustrated if I didn't have some other way to burn CDs... as it is now, it's a curiosity to poke at.

On the bright side, I've learned more about how .deb packages are constructed...

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

As an aside, Feisty's version of k3b doesn't have the dependency on cdrecord... but I'd have to upgrade a lot to get it. I haven't figured out how to point apt-get at a repo that isn't for my distro, so I'd be looking at satisfying all the dependencies by hand... sigh.

No idea whether wodim works better on Feisty, though.