Reusing an Apple superdrive with your PureOS Librem

Hardware
1

I have an old Apple USB DVD/CD external SuperDrive and wanted to listen to somes CDs while working on my Librem, and although the laptop would detect a usb device being plugged in (/dev/dvd and /dev/dvdrw were created) the drive itself wasn’t being activated. Googling for help I found this little article to unlock the drive.

The solution involves sending a series of byte to the drive to unlock it, and to do this you need to install the util package,

sudo apt-get install sg3-utils

you can then use the sg_raw command to send the magic byte sequence,

sg_raw /dev/dvd EA 00 00 00 00 00 01

(note, the drive was setup as /dev/dvd when plugged in my laptop, ls /dev to check this is the true for you too).

You can setup this as deamon rule, so that the magic happens each time you plug the drive,

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/apple-superdrive.rules

and paste in the following,

# Initialise Apple SuperDrive ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1500", ATTRS{idVendor}=="05ac", DRIVERS=="usb", RUN+="/usr/bin/sg_raw /dev/$kernel EA 00 00 00 00 00 01"

save it and you’re good to go.

Why waste a good hardware!

4 Likes
2

Good work.

Many people prefer to convert their CDs to files e.g. FLAC or MP3 and then the files can be accessible from anywhere, on any device, any time - without an ongoing need for a working optical media drive. I use abcde for this purpose.

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3

but that DOES require one to have an optical unit installed and ready …

2 Likes
4

… as a one-off at some time in the past.

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5

Indeed, and that’s why I need the CD drive :slight_smile:

I rarely use it as most of my favourite music is in mp3 or streaming … but once in a while it still comes in handy.

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6

for those that don’t know yet … mp3 is free right now but i don’t use it because it brings back too many unhappy memories … flac for audio (lossless but can be compressed or left uncompressed) no point in using mp3 unless you’d rather remember the “golden-days” when space USED to BE a problem …

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agreed, and I usually prefer ogg for most of my music as the compression for comparable quality with smaller file sizes.

8

… or you have devices that support MP3 but not FLAC. But we digress.

1 Like