blank=fast operation never finishing (Sony CD-RW)

Here's a dmesg | tail that ought to help.

Wodim is unmaintained and known to be buggy.

Did you try to use recent original software (cdrtools-3.00)?

I believe gnome baker was using this, so that's why I've filed a bug report for this. I'll give cdrtools a shot once I'm in the neighborhood again.

If you do this, you need to make sure to remove anything from wodim/cdrkit from your system, as it may be that the software has been modified to use the fork instead of the original even in case the original software is available.

Hmm... are you sure the package is actually named cdrtools? I could not find it in aptitude.

I'm subscribed to linuxmint's isadora repository, as well as ubuntu's lucid repositories.

I just managed to find it on launchpad here, and... cdrtools seems a bit outdated (and perhaps unmaintained) as well. Seems like the only package available is cdrtools-doc, and that's only available for dapper (not doing me any good either way :S)

However, cdrecord seems to be a bit more up to speed... should I try that?

cdrkit is an extremely outdated software. It offers a development state from September 2004 with additional bugs added by the cdrkit team. The software did get major enhancements and bug fixes since then, but this has been completely ignored by Ubuntu.

As Ubuntu does not offer recent legal software in official packages, there are several private efforts to create up to date cdrtools packages. These packages usually also take care of removing the buggy cdrkit software.

Ah, ok. I'll try searching for an unofficial repository containing the version you suggested, or just download the binary on their site.

Perhaps I should file a bug under ubuntu as "not having reliable cd writing binaries" :)