CD writers come with software, and for many people that default software is adequate. I'm not here to evangelize for a particular package, though as always I'm happy to recommend a few. There's the ubiquitous cdrecord
(http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html), which is included by default in just about all Linux distributions, and is often installed by default as well.

If you type man cdrecord and immediately get hives from the immense number of options for this command-line tool, don't worry. There are actually quite a number of GUI front ends that can make become familiar with this tool a lot more pleasant. For a full list of these, including screenshots, go to
http://sites.inka.de/~W1752/cdrecord/frontend.en.html ... here you'll find numerous solutions for QT/KDE, GTK/GNOME, TCL/TK, and even one for ncurses and one for Java. You might even find that one or more of these GUI solutions is already installed on your machine, or is included in your distribution media.

Many of the items listed on the page mentioned above are actually in alpha or beta. One that isn't and has a certain amount of popularity is cdrtoaster (http://www.jump.net/~brooke/cdrtoast/), which comes bundled with many distributions. If your specific interest is with music, then check out http://www.mp3-converter.com/linux/ for not only an attractive site, but also a great selection of freeware, shareware, and commercial tools for both data and multimedia.

For additional help there's also a CD-Writing HOWTO at the Linux Documentation Project site (www.tldp.org), but unfortunately it's from 2000.

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