Yesterday I replied to one of the emails about CD-RW, but forgot to hit
"reply to all" button. I thought it might be worthwhile putting in the
bulletin board.
--- It is very expensive to put CD-RW drive on an UNIX computer, not that the drive is expensive, but the software cost seems ridiculous. On the other hand, it is easy to record on PC. I have a CD-RW drive on my Dell. I transfer data from SparcStation to PC via Ws_FTP95, make a CD, take it back and mount it on Sun, and use VNMR to read the data. Well, it is not that easy. But it can be done. Here is the steps I worked out, and perhaps many others have too.The making of CD on PC: Most CD-RW on PC came with the Adaptec DirectCD software, which allows you to specify Joliet or ISO9660 format, each with several flavors. Joliet can record long filenames and they will show as such under Windows, but these names become limited to 8 characters, such as "myfile~7", when you mount the CD on Unix machines. So I have used ISO9660 format and selected the 32-character filename option. This unfortunately means one has to be disciplined enough to always limit the length of filenames (including dots and extensions) to 32 characters if CD recording is desired, or else the filename will be truncated. Now the CD is made and there is the problem of the trailing dot...
The problem of trailing dot: The PC (I think, not the CD software) puts a trailing dot after filenames that does not have any extensions. Thus, "myfid/fid" becomes "myfid/fid.", and vnmr cannot load it. Rolf Kyburz has written about this in VNMRNEWS (in Jan or Feb, 1999) and provided a workaround how to mount such CDs. I followed it and it worked perfectly. Perhaps Rolf will be agreeable to have that paragraph posted in these pages. Basically, you will have to stop the volume management as root and mount the CD with notraildot option. Rolf said in the same article that SGI default may also have the trailing dots and therefore this posts no problems for SGI users. For any programs that we have access to the loading scripts, it would seem to me not a problem.
Hsin
-- Hsin Wang, Ph.D. NMR Facility Manager College of Staten Island 2800 Victory Boulevard Staten Island, NY 10314 Phone: 718-982-3809 Fax: 718-982-3910 Email: wang@postbox.csi.cuny.edu