Can A Apple USB Superdrive Work In Linux?

Hey -

I have a Apple usb superdrive laying around. Since I no longer own any Apple computers it just sitting there collecting dust.

Does any of the people here in DLN Forum know if there is any drivers for it to work eks. Ubuntu or/and Fedora?

Some time back i found a tutorial on some forum that made it power up, and i could “feed” and eject a DVD but the DVD wold not play the content.

There is a way to do this and I remember the drive not working fresh out of the box.

Ok so after looking on the web it looks like you

  1. sudo apt install sg3-utils -y or sudo dnf install sg3_utils -y

  2. then you find the name of the device ls /dev (perhaps ls /dev/|grep sr might help more?)

  3. sudo sg_raw /dev/typedevhere EA 00 00 00 00 00 01

It looks like the Apple SuperDrive expects a specific byte sequence for reasons.

This information looks to be eight years old so I’d try just plugging it in first to see if it just works these days.

You may have to do something funky for persistence. Check the source I linked.

Source: https://cmos.blog/use-apples-usb-superdrive-with-linux/

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So you want to play a DVD on Ubuntu?

You could try

sudo apt install libdvd-pkg && sudo dpkg-reconfigure libdvd-pkg

This is the Canonical (:wink:) method.


So you want to play a DVD on Fedora?

You could try

Enabling the RPM Fusion repository (with a slight catch)

sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Then you need to enable the tainted repo.

sudo dnf install rpmfusion-free-release-tainted

Then you need to install libdvdcss.

sudo dnf install libdvdcss

This is the Fedora way.


So you want to play a DVD on Arch?

You should

sudo pacman -S libdvdread libdvdcss libdvdnav

btw i use arch

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