It is possible to download .iso files directly onto a cd\dvd\blu-ray disk.
/dev/shm is a directory found on Debian & RedHat based distributions. (Please let me know if you find it on dists as well)
/dev/shm is a dynamic RAM disk, meaning it’s size will grow and shrink with the size of the files placed there.
The following process is especially ideal for users running Linux from RAM or small USB sticks.
No drive space will be used during the process & only a very small amount of RAM is used.
First create a FIFO (first in first out) on /dev/shm
Next we command the burner to write any data written to the FIFO onto the preferred medium (dvd, cd, blu-ray, etc.)
Then we download the file ‘directly’ onto the preferred medium through the FIFO.
And finally we remove the FIFO.
I’ll demonstrate this by downloading the “Fedora Core 13 LIVECD” ISO to a CD.
petur@laptop:~$ cdrecord /dev/shm/fedora-fifo &
petur@laptop:~$ wget http://ftp.crc.dk/fedora/linux/releases/13/Live/i686/Fedora-13-i686-Live.iso -O /dev/shm/fedora-fifo
petur@laptop:~$ rm /dev/shm/fedora-fifo
Attention! The -O parameter used with wget is case sensitive!
Awesome information!!! Thanks!
great!
thanks. /dev/shm is present on Arch Linux.
emk
OpenSUSE 11.3 has a /dev/shm also
Your tip is very informative, Merci!
Bert
hm , i’ll try it bert.
smart trick
/dev/shm is in Slackware 13.1
I will try this later.
This could be tricky with flaky internet connections, like in India. I would have to be extremely lucky to get an entire ISO in one go.
Oh yes, and the power not failing during that download.
If your internet connection fails then wget will fail and stop writing to the fifo.
cdrecord should not stop, so it might be possible to launch wget again and ask it to resume the previous download…
if anyone tries this let me know
On flakey internet connections the “-c” switch allows wget to continue an interrupted download. Very useful to me in Alaska.
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that means we can burn a new cd without k3b
am i wrong or right
You don’t need k3b in order to burn cd’s…
Is it useful to put the FIFO on a RAM disk?
IIRC, a named pipe (FIFO) won’t write data on the disk anyway, it will handle all in memory. It is a “special file” which redirects its content in memory until it is consumed (read) — note that it will indeed only keep in memory the part that is not already read.
(if you don’t have a /dev/shm directory, you can create your own easily, just look at “mount -t tmpfs NONE /tmp/shm” for instance)
Not really, unless you don’t have write permission to the filesystem
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PCLinuxOS has it!
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