Sep
10

LightScribe On Linux and AMD64

Posted by Laz

Here we go with more work on my Alienware box where I ripped out Windows Vista and installed Ubuntu (8.04 Hardy Heron). I haven’t looked back since … ok, I do miss some games that don’t like Cedega or Crossover, but it’s a small price to pay for all of the other benefits I get from running Linux, and especially Ubuntu which is based on Debian.

One of the things that I got with this box was a LightScribe compaible DVD-R/CD-R. This is great, except I didn’t have any clue how to get it to work in Linux. After some digging on the net and reading all around, I got it working and boiled the steps down to a concice recipe.

These steps are listed below. Please note that these *should* work for 32 or 64 bit distros, but specifically I am running AMD64, so part of this was to get over that hump. Details are below with the commands.

First, if you don’t already have the ia32-libs or alien packages, you need to install those.

apt-get install ia32-libs
apt-get install alien

Also, if you are running Ubuntu 7.04 or newer, you might need to get an older C library.

apt-get install libstdc++5

Next, let’s download the latest LightScribe software. Luckilly, they now have Debian (.deb) packages available.

wget http://download.lightscribe.com/ls/lightscribe-1.14.25.1-linux-2.6-intel.deb

Now we need the tool that actually allows us to create and write the labels from LaCie. Notice that all they have for you is a RPM package, this is where the tool alien comes in. Alien can convert it to a Debian package, but that’s later.

wget http://www.lacie.com/download/drivers/4L-1.0-r6.i586.rpm

OK, now that we have everything downloaded, let’s install the LightScribe Debian package. Here is where we add an option if we are on the AMD64 platform (like I am). If you just use -i like normal with dpkg, the install will fail because it’s looking for i386. However, when we add the –force-all, it’ll ignore the error and install anyway.

dpkg -i --force-all lightscribe-1.14.25.1-linux-2.6-intel.deb

Next, since we don’t have a Debian package for the label maker, we need to use alien to convert it to something we can work with. Again, if we just tell alien to make a Debian package it will fail if you are on AMD64. Therefore, we tell alien to make a plain tar/gzip (.tgz) package using the -t option.