What is ODMan ?
ODMan (Optical Device Manipulator) is a free (under the GPL license)
application written in C for the GNU/Linux operating system that uses
specific commands known as IOCTLs to control, manipulate and to return
useful informations about optical device capabilities such as CD/DVD
devices. You can do a lot of interesting things with this handy
application, from simple to advanced. A few important functionalities
of ODMan are: locking,
unlocking the device tray, enabling, disabling the auto eject
functionality, kernel level device debugging, IDE/ATAPI device resets,
getting the identification information directly from the device
controller (includes device model, serial number, firmware version
informations, supported, enabled DMA, PIO modes, supported command,
feature sets and more), getting the Multi-Media informations (includes
read/write capabilities, writing modes, and more), running transfer
rate tests, and executing some other commands
Because it is a new project it do not includes all the planned
features yet, but it is a quickly developed application and new functionalities, capabilities are added often.
You can find the TODO list in the program tar ball for future planningsThree arguments
Three arguments for the existance of ODMan.
The first one: The primary objective was to create a specialized
GNU/Linux tool, program that has the ability to control and to get
useful informations from CD/DVD devices, like hdparm for ATA/SATA hard
drives.The second reason was that I wanted
to learn the C programming language very well, so what is the best and
the most efficient way to do that, simple, to practice. Whit this
project I improved my programming knowledge a lot, and I still learn
new things.
The third reason was to give something back to this gorgeous
community. I got for free all this high quality programs (GNU operating
systems with all the programs on it) and I can share it with my
friends, and what is much better I can take a look in the source codes
of those program and even to modify and see what's happening if I
run the program, with one word that is FREEDOMContact
If you find a bug, or if you have some comments, suggestions or a patch use the tracker system located on the project page, or if you find it easier you can contact me at e-mail: kantorzsolt (at) users (dot) sf (dot) net
Latest News :
New home page design for ODMan
data: March 26, 2008
I was bored so I thought let's create a new home page design for my ODMan project, because the prior was very ugly :(
ODMan 0.2 is released
data: March 24, 2008
New features:
Implemented SATA
information support in the identification
command (--Identify, or -I)
Implemented a Muilt Media information command. With this functionality you can get a device read/write capabilities, writing modes, and other useful information's (--MM-info or -M)