how would u access the cd rom?

I have a dell laptop with red hat enterprise... i also have some source code cds for red hat.. n' i need to access my cd's but unlike windows where u click on the cd drive icon linux is a lil confusing for me..

yes im a noob and anyone's help would be greatly apreciated. thank you.

Once you put it in cd into the drive the icon of that cd will show up on your desktop.This how much i know.I use the same redhat 9 and i am not happy with it at all.I am planing to go with mandrake discovery 10.0

wait scratch the first post..
i know i have to somehow mount the cd drive.. useing "mount"
.. well actually that's all i know.. how do i find the cd drive to mount? i can't seem to find it anywhere.. and if i dont have one how would i add one?
and once it's mounted how can i view and copy the contents of the cd?

you need to mount the cd (actually, the cd's filesystem to be exact) in order to access it...

you need to know the device location for your drive and you need a directory to use as a mount point...

example:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdb /mnt/cdrom

now you can access the cd by going into /mnt/cdrom...

in this example the cd-rom drive is the primary slave device...

the "-t iso9660" just says the filesystem you want to mount is the standard cd filesystem (iso9660)...

/mnt/cdrom is a typical, commonly used mount point for cd-roms...

/dev/hda = primary master

/dev/hdb = primary slave

/dev/hdc = secondary master

/dev/hdd = secondary slave

oh thanx.. i guess i didn't notice the cd icon earlier..