I hadn’t been burning too many CDs or DVDs during the past few months. Whenever I had, I was always burning distribution ISOs with Nautilus’s CD Burner. So it wasn’t until today that I found out that Brasero couldn’t handle dual layered (DL) DVDs when I was trying to burn some media files off on to a DVD for my brother.

Version 0.7.1 is installed with Hardy Heron. The lack of DL DVD was reported and fixed with 0.7.9 which was going to be included with Ubuntu’s next release, 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, which won’t be official until the end of October. Since the fix, 0.8.1 has been released for Intrepid inclusion, but what about us poor Hardy users?

Brasero is available from it’s homepage in both a source tarball and through SVN, but not everyone has the knowledge or the patience to install it from that form. That’s where Ubuntu’s backports repository comes in handy. Version 0.8.1 of Brasero is availble for Hardy through the backports repo, but there are a few important steps before we get there. Since the backports repository relies on the other repositories, we need to ensure that they’re activated as well in order to allow the backports repo to pull the correct packages needed for any upgrades.

Open Software Sources from the System > Administration menu. On the Ubuntu Software tab, make sure that main, universe, restricted, and multiverse are all checked. On the Updates tab, have hardy-security, hardy-updates, and hardy-backports checked off. Some may already have check marks, so we can leave those as is. Then just click on Close. You should be prompted about information being out of date. Go ahead and click Reload. The downloading package information window will appear followed by the familiar Update Manager icon in the panel. Click on the Update Manger icon and Brasero, along with a few other packages, should be ready to update.

Now with Brasero at 0.8.1, I can burn dual-layered DVDs until my drive catches fire.

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