Re: trixie: cdrecord can no longer write to CD

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 5:25 PM D. R. Evans <doc.evans@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I just discovered that, following the upgrade from bookworm to trixie on my
> main desktop machine, when I try to write a hierarchy of data files to the CD
> drive, k3b says: "Cdrecord [sic] has no permission to open the device".
>
> Unhelpfully, k3b doesn't tell me what is the name of the device it is trying
> to open, nor what permission it (or cdrecord) lacks :-(
>
> Any suggestions as to what I might need to change?
>
> (It probably goes without saying, but just to be complete: this worked fine
> before the upgrade. Why an upgrade would change the permissions of a program
> whose very purpose is to write to CDs is a mystery to me. But then, so are
> many things.)

I haven't seen this suggested (yet)...  you might try:

    dpkg-reconfigure cdrecord

Based on old bug reports, like Bug #374685, cdrecord fails if not
setuid root, <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=374685>.
Also see <https://bugs-devel.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=cdrecord>
and <https://bugs-devel.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=wodim>.

You could try the latest version of cdrecord, if you don't mind
building it from sources.  See
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdrtools/>.

If I recall correctly, there's been a feud going on between the author
of cdrecord and the debian maintainer for quite some time.  Debian
wants to provide setuid wrappers for cdrecord and wodim, while the
author wants Debain to use a modern version of cdrecord with Linux ACL
support.  Debian does not want the latest version of cdrecord because
of license issues.

Jeff