Currently available to CSPP students, PhD students, faculty, and staff.

The CD/DVD burning machine, daydream.cs.uchicago.edu, is located on the 1st floor of Ryerson in room 160b.

The easiest way to burn a variety of DVDs or CDs is to run k3b.

Alternately, you can do the following. These detailed instructions assume that you want to archive your home directory to CD/DVD. Note: You must burn from a local drive (/local for example). Burning from home dirs (NFS) results in FIFO underflow errors because NFS is too slow.

  • Login to daydream
  • Place a blank CD/DVD in the CDROM drive
  • mkdir -p /local/$USER
  • chmod 700 /local/$USER
  • genisoimage -J -R -o /local/$USER/image.iso ~/
  • wodim /local/$USER/image.iso
  • Now you'll have to wait up to 10 minutes, depending on how much data you are burning.
  • Mount the finished CD/DVD to make sure it worked correctly, "mount /cdrom". Then you should be able to do "ls /cdrom" to see your files.
  • Unmount the cd, "umount /cdrom" and you're done!

If you have a lot of data in your home directory, you'll want to ensure that it will fit on one CD/DVD. To learn how to check disk usage, check out the storage documentation. A blank CD can hold about 650 MB of data. A blank DVD can hold about 4.7 GB of data.

For more information on genisoimage or wodim, see the man pages.