After some struggles with a previous distro, I installed Mint 14 64-bit Cinnamon on my Desktop earlier this year, and couldn’t be more happy with it. It “just works”. Until today.

Today I got a new laptop (yeah!) because my old one died (boo) and went to burn the latest, Mint 15, on the Desktop burner so I could install it on my laptop. At this point Brasero fell on its face and while it would show me that it knew about my ISO file and my blank DVD, it wouldn’t emphasize the Burn button to allow me to burn. An updated and a reboot didn’t change anything. After a few tries it even refused to run any more.

A little research and it seems there’s some finger pointing between Brasero, an old version of cdrecord (gee I used to run that on the command line, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and Linux kernels required 14 boot line h/w parameters to be useful), and a newer, possible non-GPL compliant and buggy cdrecord.

Or maybe all this has been sorted out and I’m really suffering from another bug.

Anyway, I used Synaptic (great program!) to pull down Xfburn, which has a minimal number of packages compared to X3b, which is an awesome program but requires a large KDE library commitment to download. Xfburn has a small, tidy number of support libraries, and instantly and correctly burned me a Mint 15 DVD.

I know, I should switch to USB or net installs, but I’m old school.