Hi.
First off, I'm a total Linux newbie. Just installed Suse 8 today, and was rather disappointed that it doesn't seem to come with Apache, PHP or mySQL (all the things I want to install Linux for in the first place!).

Anyway, to my specific problem. I tried inserting some other CD-ROMs from Linux magazines that have software on I'd like to install, but I can't mount the damn things. I get the error

"Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
/dev/cdrom: No such file or directory
mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified."

So I went to /etc/fstab (as root) and changed the filesystem type to iso9660 (it's set to 'auto' at the moment) and that didn't work (but at least I got a _different_ error message - which I tried to put into a text file and save to my windows partition so I could paste it here, but I didn't have permission to do that, apparently...). /dev/cdrom _does_ exist, but it's not a directory, it just seems to be some kind of file (which won't let me make a directory called cdrom in /dev/ and won't let me delete it, either).

I'm more than a bit confused by all this, as you may have gathered by now. Anyone got any ideas?

Ian W

Ideas, dozens...

I'm a command line junky, so I tend to mount things by hand (this can be a bit of a headache for most people). First, to figure out what raw device the CDrom is. Try:

dmesg | grep hd

That will go through the kernel's log of recognizing hardware as it saw it and spit out only those lines with hd in them. This should just be the IDE devices. From this you can determine whether the cdrom is /dev/hda,b,c,d, yadyayda. My guess is that the cdrom is probably /dev/hdc, which is the first device on the second IDE channel. Try:

mount /dev/hdc /cdrom

or if it grouches about fs type:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /cdrom

You can then go back and edit /etc/fstab with the right device so maybe it'll make mounting easier in the future.

Offhand, I'm certain SuSe 8.0 came with Apache, PHP and SQL, however it probably didn't install them as defaults unless you choose to pick out your packages "expertly", or chose a "server" installation. I think SuSe has made the switch to not even installing a compiler these days if you chose "workstation". You can either: use YAST2 to install the RPMs that you need, or just rpm'em from the command line... or even use one of the other package installers depending on what desktop you installed, probably KDE.

Luck,

Finegan

Finegan, you forgot to tell our friend that /dev/cdrom is usually a symlink to the device.

Try

dmesg | grep hd

as Finegan mentioned. Then do a :

ls -l /dev/cdrom

If /dev/cdrom doesn't point to the device you identified as your cdrom drive, make a symlink for it:

ln -sf /dev/mycdromdrivehere /dev/cdrom

Then try to mount as usual.

HTH,

vfs.

P.S. Finegan, is your nick related to a 'fine gun'?

Doh! I knew that was bugging me. I'm far too used to Slackware...

Nah, The name is a devolution of Finn, from Huck Finn (Mark Twain), that wandered through a little James Joyce and ended up being Finegan. Its an uncommon Irish name by lineage more or less. As with most nicknames though, it picked me a while back and I just ran with it.

Cheers,

Finegan

ok, did the grep thing, and it showed that /dev/cdrom was a symlink to /dev/hdd, so I changed /etc/fstab to that effect (figured there might be something wrong with the link, so why not try the original file that as being linked _to_), then got a different message saying that the filesystem was not specified.

Incidentally, I saved the session text into a text file, formatted a floppy (in DOS format, allegedly), saved the file with a .txt extension, booted to the Windows partition so I could come here and post the session so y'all could see what I was doing, and Windows can't read the floppy! Not even in a DOS window - it knows it's a KDE floppy and doesn't think there are any files on it! What's the point of formatting a floppy in DOS format if DOS can't then read it? But at least the exercise shows that the floppy can mount/unmount, so there's just something screwy with the CD-ROM drive (yet Yast2 can read files off the system disks to install software etc, it's just magazine cover disks it seems to have problems with).

I'm real frustrated now, beginning to think life is too short for this and maybe I'd be better off just finding the most stable version of Windows I can and forgetting Linux entirely. All this aggravation just to look at the contents of a f**king CD!

pissed off. this really _doesn't_ bode well for the future...

Ian W

I used yast2 to probe my hardware, and it reckoned the CD-ROM drive as sr0, so I tried

mount /dev/sr0 /cdrom

and it worked (even if I'm not suite sure why).

sorry for the outburst in the last post - I know that power brings complexity, it's just not always fun being on the wrong end of it, is all.

onwards!

ianwest

Ah...

and thus the student was enlightened. I even know what went kazoo.

SuSe, being a kind and helpful distro created a symlink to your cdrom, the second IDE channel, second device, /dev/hdd. This was to make mounting easier.

Somehow, scsi emulation was chosen, usually to get a cd-burner working as the current Linux burning utilities all require spoofing the scsi command set to an atapi IDE device. This changes the cdrom device from /dev/hdd, the 4th IDE device to /dev/sr0, the 1st SCSI device. This was in conflict with symlink SuSe built on install.

YaST, and this is a guess, the rest I'm pretty sure about, probably scans through the first 4-8ish IDE devices and first 4-14ish SCSI devices when looking for install media on a cdrom. Therefore, it doesn't care where your CDROM is according to fstab, it looks everywhere. This makes sense as that might have been the easiest on the developers who had to deal with NFS, CDs, ISO images on local disk, blah blah blah.

Two smart programs, trying to outsmart one another proved how stupid they are.

Linux has got a while to go before its truly user friendly. Give it some time man, and good luck.

Cheers,

Finegan