howto: synaptic recognize 2nd CD-drive ?
 

I have varying luck with my builtin cd-drive - /cdrom
however, a 2nd CD drive /cdrom1... a USB type... works
all the time, except for the fact that Synaptic will not
currently recognize it.

I dont understand this, as I burn CD backups
frequently using cdrecord and the USB CD-drive...
again, it is Synaptic (debian package manager) which
wont read from this drive, mounted or no.

So, the question is: how to make Synaptic read CDs
from this USB CD-drive ?

thanks to any who can help

You can start synaptic with 'synaptic --add-cdrom /path/to/cd'. I believe that should let you use your external drive. I don't have any package cds though, so I can't test it for you.

(I discovered this by running 'synaptic --help', BTW).

There may also be some kind of advanced "internal option" available for setting the drive path, but I searched around and I couldn't find any documentation on what expert options are available.

David - thanks so much for this answer. I looked for 2 or 3
days, including the synaptic man page... as it were, having
never seen any mention of an --add-cdrom option Im still not
sure this is available in my current version.
I will look, and thank you again. Possibly I'll need to upgrade.

David - just wanted to report that that command DOES work !!

Funny, because, even with the specific line, I had trouble finding
any direct reference to this command in any synaptic documentation.

Thank you again. Been looking for more than a year.