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pBurn optical burner version 4.4

May 21, 2026 — BarryK

Have posted recently about burner apps for CDs and DVDs, including pBurn:

Forum member zigbert did an incredible job with pBurn, it is very sophisticated. Really, if some minor niggles get fixed, it is, I think, superior to the mainstream burner apps such as Xfburn and Brasero.

pBurn is tied into the infrastructure and utilities available in the traditional Puppy Linux. EasyOS maintains all of that so-called "legacy" infrastructure, such as gtk2-based and X11-based Xdialog and gtkdialog. Also, very specific Puppy utilities such as 'cddetect_quick'.

pBurn has been neglected for a long time. For me, because I don't use optical media anymore. But some people do, so there is still a need. I have recently had a need to extract audio off a CD, but Easy has other apps for ripping CDs and DVDs.

Time for pBurn to get some TLC! Fixed a couple of issues...

"File -> Quit" hangs, but does work after the optical media is ejected. Simple fix, put an "eject --cdrom" into the code (full 'eject', not the busybox applet).

pBurn requires 'cdrtools', see link above; Easy now has cdrtools instead of cdrkit. This requires careful thought for a pup that uses 'apt' to manage packages, due to conflicts with the cdrkit packages.

One thing that I recall from using pBurn years ago, quiting by clicking on the window close-box can leave processes running. It is necessary to quit via the menu "File -> Quit". I disabled the close-box by giving the main pBurn window a class-name of "pburn", and this into /etc/xdg/templates/_root_.jwmrc:

	<Group>
		<Class>pburn</Class>
		<Option>noclose</Option>
	</Group>

Strange, but Xdialog "--tailbox" is not working. This causes a log window while burning to remain empty. Fortunately, zigbert created a fallback log window, that is intended to be used if Xdialog isn't available; so using that.

The next release of Easy will have pBurn 4.4 builtin, but for other pups, the 'pburn-4.4.pet' is available here:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/noarch/packages/pet/pet_packages-noarch/

Have only done some basic testing with a DVD-RW, blanking it and writing a .iso to it. Further testing will be up to you guys. Starting a discussion thread in the forum:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=16907

Very happy to be keeping another "legacy" app alive!    

Tags: easy