Gay Linux DVD burning questions

Ok, I got the NEC ND-3540A which does DVD-R and DVD+R at 16x. I installed it in my old Linux box, running Redhat 7.3 and kernel 2.4.18-3. I installed a shitload of stuff:

Code:

cdrtools-beta.tar.gz  ffmpeg-0.4.9-pre1.tar.gz  lame-3.96.1.tar.gz        mpeg2dec-0.4.0b.tar.gz cdrtools.tar.gz        jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz        libdvdread-0.9.4.tar.gz  transcode-1.0.0.tar.gz

I had some problems installing transcode and then dvdrecord and basically said f**k it and just resorted to cdrecord. After more f*****g around I finally got it working, but it kept complaining that the drive does not support TAO. According to this page the drive supports "DAO, SAO,TAO with zero gap,variable or fixed packet, multisession." So question #1: how can I get it to recognize that the drive is tao-capable? I don't really think I care that much, but if the drive has it then the software shouldn't tell me it doesn't.

Issue #2 is that cdrecord refused to write to DVD media unless I used some precompiled binary:

Code:

cdrecord: Found DVD+ media but DVD+R/DVD+RW support code is missing. cdrecord: If you need DVD+R/DVD+RW support, ask the Author for cdrecord-ProDVD. cdrecord: Free test versions and free keys for personal use are at ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/ProDVD/ cdrecord: Sorry, no CD/DVD-Recorder or unsupported CD/DVD-Recorder found on this target. cdrecord: This version of cdrecord does not include DVD-R/DVD-RW support code. cdrecord: If you need DVD-R/DVD-RW support, ask the Author for cdrecord-ProDVD. cdrecord: Free test versions and free keys for personal use are at ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/ProDVD/

So I went and downloaded cdrecord-prodvd-2.01.01-i686-pc-linux-gnu, and then read the readme which said I had to set a key in the environment or else the thing wouldn't write more than 1GB, so I did that shit also via the cdrecord-wraper.sh script. My question is, what the f**k is this all about, and is there any other utility I can use to write DVDs from the command line in Linux? I only want to write data discs at this point, I don't care about mastering video DVDs etc.

Anyone have any tips for making multi-session discs via this s****y system, and/or adding additional sessions to a multi-session disc? The command I ended up using to burn the disc was

Code:

mkisofs -r -R -J -l -allow-leading-dots /home/x/hdbackup | cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 -v -sao --eject speed=4 tsize=2000000000 -

because even though my burner "doesn't support" TAO, it insisted I specify a track size, so I just guessed at 2 billion bytes (can the size be abbreviated like 'tsize=2G'?). I don't know if I can still add more to the disc after having created it with the above command, if not then I wasted half the disc, but I was just glad my first burn wasn't a coaster.

Code:

Total rockridge attributes bytes: 68038 Total directory bytes: 212992 Path table size(bytes): 1120 Track 01: 1290 of 1907 MB written (fifo 100%) [buf  95%]   2.6x.Max brk space used 98000 662479 extents written (1293 MB) Track 01: 1293 of 1907 MB written (fifo 100%) [buf  94%]   2.5x. Track 01: Total bytes read/written: 1356756992/1356756992 (662479 sectors). Writing  time:  420.160s Average write speed   3.4x. Min drive buffer fill was 4% Total of 1 possible drive buffer underruns predicted. Fixating... Fixating time:   36.233s ./cdrecord-ProDVD: fifo had 21372 puts and 21372 gets. ./cdrecord-ProDVD: fifo was 0 times empty and 11427 times full, min fill was 65%.