Let there be Light… Scribe

Ok, I’ve slowly been working on getting more stuff working with Ubuntu on my main system. Tonight, it’s the LG lightscribe DVD burner.

Just before dumping WinXP, I found the LightScribe official site, and had noticed they had Linux versions of a few things. So tonight I got back and end up on the Linux download page and find they have a Debian version of the system software package. I click to download… open it… and the package just kicks in.

When it’s done, I go back and grab the Simple Labeler, The -deb file again. I used the template labeler on WinXP, so we’ll see how different this is. Nothing was installed to my Applications menu. I browse to the opt folder, there’s a new lightscribeApplications folder, and in there SimpleLabeler. Start it up, and grab a CD to test it out with.

Simple Labeler does.. simple labels. A graphical ring around the hub area with a top and/or bottom area of text. After typing some jibberish in, selecting the paw prints graphic, it does a preview and I click the print button. Then after a couple minutes of media detecting… the tray pops out and it asks me to insert a compatible disk, label side down. Hmmm? ok. I pull the disk out, put it back in, close the tray and click OK. It starts chugging along… two minutes later it pops it out again… and whoa, it worked!

Next step, a quick Google search finds this page on the Ubuntu Forums - it explains a lot of what I just did, but has the added bonus of a link to a program called LaCiE LightScribe Labeler for Linux, or 4L - someone made a Deb package you can grab. It installed to my /usr folder. I haven’t tested it yet, but the look is very similar to the Template Labeler off the LightScribe site… except after looking at it for a few minutes, you can not add text to the label.

Basically, 4L seems to take an image and print that image only, as either a title band (narrow, a bit inside from the center hub), a content band (from hub out to the same layer as the title band), or full disk. If you want text, you have to put it in your image first. So… the search for something else will continue, but this will do for now.

Actually, the LightScribe site has some great graphics you can download (here and here), and I had already figured I could use them as templates for my own images if needed. So maybe for what little work I actually do with the labeling, this could work for now.