Ubuntu saves the day

[Michael Moore]

Sorry, sent this to google groups instead of the right list...

My wife does wedding and engagement photography, and gives her
customers a DVD with their pictures on it. Today, she was supposed to
deliever 3 DVDs to one of her customers. We thought there would be no
problem, as the ISO was already made, and two of the disks were
already burned. The third disk was set to burn as we went to bed last
night, so it'd be done this morning.

The only DVD burner we had was in the iMac, running OSX 10.3. The DVD
didn't burn. Several reboots and ~15 coasters later the DVD burner
still wouldn't burn anything -- it would start and then spit out
"buffer under-run error".

With about 2 hours before she had to deliever the DVDs, I went and
bought a new DVD burner, and put it in a firewire enclosure I had
laying arround. OSX would read disks from it, but wouldn't burn to it.

We put the ISO on the Ubuntu machine, put the DVD drive on there as
well, and in about 4 minutes, the DVD was perfectly burned! No messing
with extra software, no configuring the drive (OSX made us pick a
region before we could even read data disks from the drive)...just
right click the ISO and "burn image".


epilogue

OSX is a nice OS, but we've been moving more and more of my wife's
stuff over to Ubuntu. iPhoto couldn't handle the 5000+ photos we were
storing very well, so we put up gallery2 on Ubuntu and it's working
great. Her DVDs are created with some scripts I wrote, plus dvdauthor,
saving her roughly 6 hours per photoshoot she does. Photo touch up was
being done on OSX with the Gimp, but has now switched to Ubuntu.

When that iMac dies, I don't believe we'll be getting another one. :-)

(and of course, I've only got Ubuntu for myself)


--
Michael Moore