The Site With the Lamp

February 14, 2005

My collection of backup CDs became obsolete, thanks to a corrupted svn revision file. The sensible thing to do is to throw these CDs away and create a new set of CDs. Unfortunately the geek in me would not allow me to do that.

Only some of the files on these CD are unusable, the geek (reddish in color, horns, pointed tail, cloven hooves) tells me that I should figure out how to delete/hide the unwanted files and replace them with new ones.

I know this can be done on that operating system made by a persons whose description is also said to match the description above (no I am not talking of BSD). Curiosly the post about the subversion malformed file has an entry number of 666.

It was with the greatest difficult that I first managed to burn CDs on linux. Since then I have stuck on K3B and think it wonderfull. Unfortunately K3B does not let you delete files that have already been burnt - or at least version that is part of my Fedora Core installation (0.11.14-2) cannot . Now that's where libmad comes into the picture.

I decided to update to the latest version of K3B using YUM. Unfortunately it refused to update this cd burner and complained about a missing libma. That's a nice name but no where as original as 'get ... witghoutusingsomany dmand globa;s' that I encountered in mediawiki a few months ago.

MAD as it turns out stands for MPEG Audio Decorder. Sounds interesting but I am not sure if i need it, for having given up with yum and RPM based installation, I resorted to the time honoured configure, make and make install and it was painless.

Afterwards, I found that the new version of k3b was not capable of deleting an existing file either but it could overwrite one, which was good enough for me.