I just got a cd containing various data I want to view. When I insert the cd and try to display its contents using Nautilus I get an error message that says;
"You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of 'cdrom'."
The same goes for my other cdrom device, cdrom2.
I'm a simple newbie, but I'm guessing I have to change the permissions. When I query the permissions in the mnt directory at the moment I get the following output;
[me@local host mnt]$ ls -l
total 10
drwx------ 9 1620 6310 2048 Dec 10 12:13 cdrom/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 4 2004 cdrom2/
drwxrwxrwx 0 root root 0 Mar 14 13:23 floppy/
drwxrwxrwx 0 root root 0 Mar 14 13:23 hd/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 4 2004 windows/

I'm running recently installed Mandrake10.
What do I have to do to be able access the contents of cds?

usually there is a graphical way of changing permissions - right click the mountpoint you want to change and you get a dialog with various tabs - one handles permissions. You may need to be root.

OTOH: the commands handling permissions are

chown (change ownership)
chgrp (change group)
chmod (change permissions)

just

man chmod

for the lecture.

As the listing for /cdrom shows, only root has permissions on it. To correct it, after you have mounted it, run this command as root
This will leave the existing permissions alone, but grant Read access to other users. That ought to do it -- J.W.

The permissions for /mnt/cdrom/ and /mnt/cdrom2/ are both 744 but I still am having trouble acessing CD contents.

[adunkin@localhost mnt]$ ls
cdrom/ cdrom2/ floppy/ hd/ hd2/ hda1/ windows/
[adunkin@localhost mnt]$ cd cdrom
bash: cd: cdrom: Permission denied
[adunkin@localhost mnt]$ ls -l
total 16
drwxr--r-- 2 root root 4096 Jul 4 2004 cdrom/
drwxr--r-- 2 root root 4096 Jul 4 2004 cdrom2/
drwxrwxrwx 0 root root 0 Jun 27 20:43 floppy/
drwxrwxrwx 0 root root 0 Jun 27 20:43 hd/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 21 13:03 hd2/
drwxrwxrwx 0 root root 0 Jun 27 20:43 hda1/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 4 2004 windows/

I can't acess the contents of /mnt/cdrom/ using a terminal or via Nautilus graphical file manager.
Under Applications>System>Configuration>Hardware>CD Properties
There is a GUI to set CD preferences. For Data Discs "Mount discs when inserted" and "Start Auto run on newly inserted discs" are selected under this GUI.
What do I have to do to see what is on CDs placed into /mnt/cdrom/ and /mnt/cdrom2/?

I just executed
$ mount /mnt/cdrom
and this got me access to the CD.
Will I always have to execute this command from a terminal the first time I want to look at a CD during a session?

Looks like you're machine ain't mounting the CDRoms when they are inserted dosn't it? Show us your fstab entry for your drives, we'll see iffin we can't fix that for you so the volumes mount at insertion.

I think it should be something like:

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 auto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 iso9660 auto,user,ro 0 0

Also - please put your distro in your profile (My LQ > Edit Profile) so it shows up in the sidebar (left). Means we don't have to hunt through previous posts to remind ourselves...

Here is the contents of /etc/fstab/

/dev/hdc1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hdc6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdb /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-15,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0
none /mnt/hda1 supermount dev=/dev/hda1,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,kudzu,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc5 swap swap defaults 0 0
none /mnt/hd supermount dev=/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,kudzu,codepage=850 0 0


Any help appreciated. It seems the GUI tool for automounting CDs does not work.

Here's your cd drives:replace the "noauto" entry with "auto". This is stopping the disks automounting.

umask=0 is the same as chmod 777.
user means that you don't have to be root to mount/unmount
iocharset and codepage just selects some defaults.
ro means mount read-only
exec allows execution too - so you can open directories probably.
0 0 are for when they mount - i.e. after everything else.

What you want is...but you can keep the rest if you're squeemish.

GUI Tool: in what way dosn't it work? You click the icon and nothing happens? The tool comes up but it only has the "floppy" entry in it? What?

You can probably find out about it by right-clicking the launcher and looking at what commandline is called. (It will probably be to a script or a symlink... so follow it through the file system until you find the actual command. You will find information by typing man <command> or <command> -h in terminal.) For eg. In my system, the launcher (rt-click)>properties>launcher tells me that the command is "usermount". man usermount gets me information about how it works.

Thanks, I'll make the changes next time I'm at my PC.
When I say the GUI based disc mounting tool does not work I mean
that it is a GUI containing options to automount discs and selecting
these options appears to have done nothing. I have all the automount
options in this GUI tool selected, but discs still don't automount.
Thus I feel this GUI tool does not work.