I have tried brasero, xfburn, xcdroast, none of them work with my laptops CD burner.

I used this CD burner with Active@ IsoBurner to burn CDs in Windows XP and it works with Wine in Linux ( but a PITA to use in Wine)

I have read that it is the GUI that causes the problem but if a five megabyte freeware in a nine year old version of Windows can handle it what is the real problem ?
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well,
would be helpfull if we would know the brand, modell and interface of your burner.
The burning programs you mentioned are mostly a gui-frontend to cdrecord resp. wodim which do the main part of burning. Maybe your cd.burner is one of the rare examples that are still not supported by those applications.
Have you tried to use a live-cd like aptosid or kanotix for testing ? They use k3b which is another frontend for cdrecord and wodim.

regards

Reiner
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As noted, ignore the branding of the front end for the burning core tools.

I suggest examining the more important things, like how much memory your system has.

Your question however contains a hint to the answer: a 9 year old OS was written to run well on only a fraction of the ram that a newer OS is created for. Windows used to be extremely memory efficient, despite totally false and ungrounded claims otherwise in FOSS circles. XP, for example, ran just fine on 128mB ram, no real issues, in fact I made a friend a system out of an old HP box that was I think about 200 mghz, 128 mB ram, and it worked great. Not super fast, but fine.

It's only very recently that *nix based systems actually beat windows in terms of ram / resource use, the last few years, ie, only once Vista was released did this actually change.

So note this: in htop, or top, see what the system resource is, use ctrl+m to see memory use listed in order, ctrl+p for cpu use.

If you are close to 0 available ram prior to burning, and then you open a burning gui, it's quite likely it simply does not have enough ram.

However, since you gave exactly zero pieces of relevant information other than 'my laptop' it's basically impossible to say anything further.

relevant information: laptop make and model; laptop cpu speed and type; amount of memory; and last but probably least important, burning speed supported by burner. Unless the burner is worn out, which they do do in laptops especially, those things are flimsy and not durable at all.
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Toshiba Satellite A105-s1014
Celeron 1.5ghz
1536 mb RAM
TSSTcorp CDW/DVD TS-L462C TO10
4x, 8x, 10x, 16x, 20x, 24x

The burner still works, at least with Windows or Wine

I have not tried K3b, in Debian it plus the 76 dependencies is 196 mb
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install inxi if you don't have it, then do: inxi -tm20

that will show your top 20 memory consuming processes. See if something seems to be out of proportion or way off.

Your hardware and ram are fine, so I'm going to assume reiner called this one right in his diagnosis if nothing is eating your memory.

I've not seen any burning hardware where a gui burning app didn't work in Linux, but I haven't tested very much either.


You're also not at all defining the term: doesn't work

What doesn't work? how doesn't it work? what is the exact error? It's far far far easier helping people if they provide every bit of information at first, not post by post.

The term 'my laptop' or "doesn't work" have exactly zero diagnostic value for anyone trying to help you, beyond the reiativel trivial fact that a laptop exists where burning a cd doesn't work, which is not very useful information, that's like saying a car doesn't work.
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I apologize for not providing more info in my first post, my posting time has been limited recently. And more venting frustration than else.

In watching conky while burning CDs with Active@ IsoBurner with Wine it has never gone above 15% cpu or memory.

My problems with brasero and xfburn have been that neither have been able to detect the speeds of my hardware burner, and only give max speed which is not good for making bootable Linux CDs

With xcdroast it gave errors of not finding cdrecord which was not a dependency of the package and wanted me to tell it where lib files were, which were installed with it. I guess I should not expect much from alpha software last released in 2008, with a manual from 2003.

As I noted before K3b wants the KDE desktop to be installed with it, does not seem worth it to me just to burn CDs

In reading the Aptosid manual they say most problems are caused by the GUI and recommend the CLI (it turned up in Google)

I have a hard time with the idea of telling my computer exactly how to do a simple job every time. Bad enough I have to set the speed in Windows every time--two extra mouse clicks.

I do not know if it is possible to set the speeds in a config file and only need to do this once.
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use a script, varies for dvd or cd, set the command line options, do once.

aptosid or sidux had such a script, for example.

growisofs for instance has the -speed option.

All you need is:

application <options> <iso path> <burner path>

something like that, it's trivial.

Just look for any command line script that will do this for you, and stop wasting time on the gui stuff if this is your only issue.

Many times a script is far far far faster long term than any gui, not always, but sometimes that is the simple truth.

abcde for example is way faster for ripping cds than any gui, and does it better. I use script to convert shn to flac too, one command. Same for acxi.

So just find a script that burns isos and supports listing the desired speed.
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