Audio CD not playing
 

I have Linux Mandrake 9.0. Everything is working just fine. I can play mp3s, videos... Cd is working fine (I can play mp3s from it too...).
But I can't play Audio CDs !
My Cd is /dev/hdd
Gnome CD Player says first says "Invalid CD device". Grip says nothing - it just doesn't detect any tracks...

By the way, playing Audio CDs is working in Windows so it's not a hardware problem....

When I try to go to the /mnt/cdrom it says:
Sorry, couldn't display all the contents of "cdrom"
Of course, it says this only if Audio CD is in.

Any clue?

Yeah, symlink /dev/hdd to /dev/cdrom, then chmod 666 both /dev/hdd and /dev/cdrom and chmod 666 /dev/audio, and it should work.
HTH
-NSKL

Audio CD not playing - solved
 

Thanks. I did all you said and now it works.

Opet ti! Izvini sto ti nisam poslao mail pre nedelju dana kad si mi isto pomagao - reinstalirao sam Windows, pa onda neki problemi itd...
Hvala na pomoci.... Sve je uspelo...
A sta se desilo pa mi nije radilo? (posto sam prilicno nov u Linuxu hteo bih da razumem problem da mogu da ga resim drugi put ako se desi...)

Ok, since i dont think others will appreciate us talking in a strange language..
He said that now the cd is playing fine, but he wants to know what was wrong, why it didn't play before:

Cd player programs look for a /dev/cdrom device, and if they don't find it, they abort (unless you specify another device). So to solve this we symlink /dev/hdX (actual cdrom device) with /dev/cdrom. This way cd players find /dev/cdrom (actually /dev/hdX, in your case /dev/hdd)
Then cd music is played to the sound card via /dev/audio, not the usual /dev/dsp, so we chmoded 666 (gave everyopne permission) to use /dev/audio, /dev/cdrom and /dev/hdd.
HTH
-NSKL

Not solved entirely
 

I found out that my problem isn't solved entirely...
CD plays well now - but when I started Linux today - Gnome won't load!! Then I restarted it into the text mode, deleted the /dev/cdrom, restarted Linux - Gnome started fine. But playing Audio CDs isn't working...
To check out if the cd is the problem, I made a link agan - again the same thing happened....
What to do?
I mean - I can do the same operation every time I wan't to plays CDs and after that I can delete the link - but there must be an elegant solution...

And one more question, you said:
"Cd player programs look for a /dev/cdrom device"
Why won't it work when I change the option and tell the programs that the device is /dev/hdd ?

And just to check out since I have never done the linking before - is the right command:
ln -s /dev/hdd /dev/cdrom

Yes the command is right. As for the GNOME problem i really can't help because i never used it, and can't think of a reason why a symbolic link to /dev/cdrom would screw it up.
If you specify a different device for the cd player program, it should work. I dont know about any others, but in KSCD you can go to options, and change the cdrom device from /dev/cdrom to whatever you want.
Also you may want to try to play the cd with the play command. man play
play --device=/dev/hdd should do it, i think... to make sure check the man page.
And finally, does GNOME or X give any error messages? Did you try booting to text mode and starting x with startx command? Any errors that might give a clue? Maybe check the X log file, i'm not sure where it should be on Mandy, it's /var/log/XFree86.0.log on Slack.
HTH
-NSKL

No Gnome gives no error messages. It starts normaly, the window with Gnome logo..., loads up the wallpaper and stops where it usualy loads panels and desktop...
KDE starts normaly... The strange thing was that sometimes when I start KDE and then log out and start Gnome - it starts well... but sometimes it doesn't... (I can't figure out when it does and when it doesn't...)

I can't find that log file...
If I type startx - it starts KDE.