System Notes Org

Every once in a while, I like to try a few live CD's to see how the distros are progressing. I am happy to report that Ubuntu is getting more usable with each release. I titled this "Notes from..", rather than "Notes about", because I was able to work within a live CD session, and save my files. I admit I wasn't very impressed with the first version of Ubuntu I looked at. That was version 4.1, which I got in live CD format from a local linux user group meeting. After realizing that I couldn't read my NTFS partitions, I played a few games, and quickly lost interest. Also, I had a slower laptop at the time, and having the os frequently read from the CDROM made the experience slightly annoying. Now with a faster CDROM drive, and all the updates, the system is quite pleasant to use. Getting Started Using a boot CD is quite easy, and does not require anything to be installed to the hard drive. The entire operating system can be booted from a CD, and run...

This little shell script is a good example of how to simplify a task with a wrapper script. Rather than trying to remember which settings to use for cdrecord, I just run my cdroast.sh script. ----- begin script ----- #!/bin/sh # cdroast.sh # scottm, 2005-07-20 # wrapper for cdrecord INPUT = $1 if [ $INPUT ] then cdrecord -v -sao dev = 0 , 0 , 0 $INPUT else printf " \n Enter name of file \n " printf " e.g. $0 filename.iso \n\n " fi ----- end script ----- Now, with the script in my path, all I have to type is: $ cdroast.sh myfile.iso and the burn process will start. This type of script is often called a wrapper, since it wraps a simple script around a more complicated procedure.