K3b refuses to burn. Gives error: Cdrecord has no permission to open device

**SonicSteve** · March 6th, 2009

NEW info,

After upgrading to 8.10 intrepid the burning initially worked. Then somewhere along the way it stopped again. Since burners are quite cheap I picked up an LG sata 20x burner. I tested it and it works well. If this changes I'll let you know.

For the record as far as I know the other burner is still functional also. There may be some DVD firmware issues that are causing this. Updating the firmware may solve this. I know under windows LG offers a firmware update tool, I'm not aware of any such tool for Linux though there is probably a way.

**vapor0** · April 26th, 2009

My cd-burner had no issues, until I "upgraded" to jaunty. Now I am suffering the same BS as everybody else in this thread. "Cdrecord has no permissions".

Ubuntu devs, would you please offer cdrecord as a package? This wodim sucks a$$...

**vapor0** · April 26th, 2009

This apparently is because Debian won't let cdrecord be packaged for apt, and uses wodim instead. All my cd burning apps are broken in jaunty.

**hpp3** · April 30th, 2009

OK, I've solved this.
The first clue is this line in the error log:

Code:

/usr/bin/wodim: Operation not permitted. Warning: Cannot raise RLIMIT_MEMLOCK limits.

This means that it is trying to lock memory for the burning operation and doesn't have permission.
There are two ways to deal with this:

1 - Set permissions for the CDROM group through the PAM security module.

Open a terminal and type:

Code:

sudo nano /etc/security/limits.conf

and enter this line:

Code:

@cdrom     -     memlock     unlimited

Restart and it should work.

2 - Give wodim the root SUID so wodim has root privileges no matter who runs it.
[WARNING: This is the simplest solution, but is a potential security risk]

Open a terminal and type:

Code:

sudo chmod u+s /usr/bin/wodim

Run K3b as usual.

Hope this helps...

**DesertEagle** · October 23rd, 2009

Originally Posted by hpp3

OK, I've solved this.
The first clue is this line in the error log:

Code:

/usr/bin/wodim: Operation not permitted. Warning: Cannot raise RLIMIT_MEMLOCK limits.

This means that it is trying to lock memory for the burning operation and doesn't have permission.
There are two ways to deal with this:

1 - Set permissions for the CDROM group through the PAM security module.

Open a terminal and type:

Code:

sudo nano /etc/security/limits.conf

and enter this line:

Code:

@cdrom     -     memlock     unlimited

Restart and it should work.

2 - Give wodim the root SUID so wodim has root privileges no matter who runs it.
[WARNING: This is the simplest solution, but is a potential security risk]

Open a terminal and type:

Code:

sudo chmod u+s /usr/bin/wodim

Run K3b as usual.

Hope this helps...

Thank you so much! This did in fact eliminate the permissions issue (I tried method 1, didn't verify method 2)

You rock!

( On a side note, I burned 2 more coasters after using your method, but I'm pretty sure it has to do with my burner not liking others methods besides TAO, since it reported the same error as on previous runs. )