Toaster away

Success, finally. At last the home desktop is burning CD's and DVD's. Finally the last hurdle in the Linux build is over. The issue as it turns out had to do with permissions of cdrecord, the underlying burning program. My good friend Tophe pointed me in that direction and I now have it up and running. I would be a very happy camper were it not for the fact my laptop refuses to burn CD's from MP3 files. I know this is an Ubuntu issue as the codec is not GPL. What that means in simple English is that the way of compressing the sound uses software that is not freely available (free as in beer!). Ubuntu only installs completely free software by default, so things like MP3 support are lacking. While I understand the arguement behind this, most of us have thousands of MP3's on our machines we want to play and burn. Using Ubuntu out the box makes this impossible. IF it were a simple "click here to install this capability" I would be happy, but it is a lot more complex than that. Something I need to solve tomorrow!

Oh, Happy new year, by the way. Here's hoping for a great 2006 for everyone, planetwide