Monday, January 12, 2009

ImgBurn on Linux

I've seen this covered in other places, but it never worked for me until today, so I thought I'd share my solution.

First off, why would anyone want to use ImgBurn on Linux? Well, I'm not very fond of the linux disc burning programs (k3b and Brasero for example). Brasero refuses to ackowledge the existence of my dvd burner. k3b will burn, but verification is hit or miss. The discs it says failed to verify have all been verified on windows machines using ImgBurn, and they work when I put them to use. Brasero can verify images using md5 sums, but it gives me the same result as k3b; failure. So I can't trust things I burn with k3b, but when I use ImgBurn on Windows, it always works. If ImgBurn says the disc is bad, the disc is bad; otherwise, it's good.

Everyone says ImgBurn works fine in Wine (I'm using version 1.1.10 btw), but it always failed to find my dvd burner. For some reason, Wine doesn't seem to recognize that I have an optical drive unless there is a disc already mounted in it. If I mount a disc first, then start ImgBurn, we find the dvd burner.

So, in summation, to use ImgBurn on linux, you need Wine and the ImgBurn installer. Install wine and run winecfg. On the drives tab, click Autodetect. I left the OS as Windows XP. I am using alsa for the sound driver. Now you can run wine SetupImgBurn_2.4.2.0.exe (or whatever the current version is when you try this).

Now, to run ImgBurn, just make sure a disc is mounted in your drive and start ImgBurn (wine "C:\Program Files\ImgBurn\ImgBurn.exe"). Eject the disc after ImgBurn starts and you can replace it with a blank one.

A simple fix to get a great program working under Linux. I hope someday k3b and brasero are as nice as ImgBurn.

3 comments:

  1. Yeah, it would be very nice to have a native ImgBurn implementation on Linux. It is the ultimate burner, I don't think anything else could ever compete.

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  2. I'm not sure what's happened, but ImgBurn has been very hit or miss for me lately. I've started using k3b. I think they fixed the problem they were having before.

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