Help a newbie configure sound and cdrom
 

I recently installed college linux on an old p3 box that was barely moving at all with windows 98. Now it moves with incredible speed with college linux. For some reason it was the only distro that would take. Not even knoppix would boot up! But I digress.
I can't seem to acsess the cdrom drive. When I put a cd in and try to mount a get an error message along the lines of "mount point iso9660 does not exist". Any ideas on how to fix this problem? I currently need root access to mount. Does anybody know how I can change that so I can do it as a regular user.
Also my sound isn't working at all. I can run mp3s and such, but no sound comes out. It recognized the card when I was installing it but now I get nothing at all? I've heard of programs called alsamixer and alsaconfig for slackware, but they don't seem to work on college linux (which is based on slackware). Somebody please help me!

To make the cdrom mountable by user edit the /etc/fstab file (using nano /etc/fstab or pico /etc/fstab or any other editor) and add user to the 4th column over on the cdrom line....

Ex:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro,user 0 0

To correct the mount point error.. do

mkdir /mnt/cdrom

Notice /mnt/cdrom matches the second column in the above example.

Sound is usually muted by default after install, you need to run a mixer like alsamixer, but those are not in your system you said, so try gamix or any other mixer program.

cannot create directory
 

When I try to make the directory, the shell is giving me an error "cannot create directory '/mnt/cdrom': File exists". Should I delete the old directory and then mkdir?

/mnt/cdrom/ exists already then. Can you post your /etc/fstab file.

okay
 

Okay I got that working. For some reason the first column was missing /dev/cdrom and I wasn't catching it. Now how do I mount my floppy and CDR drives? As far as mixers where can I find them for college linux.

crazy additional problem
 

Okay this is wierd and maybe a stupid question now my disk drive won't open. Do I need to do something special to achieve this. Seems like a stupid question but hey, I'm a newbie.
Also is there any good p2p software for linux other than edonkey? Is there a version of emule for linux?

Ahh..yes that makes since .... mount point iso9660 missing.. cant believe I didnt catch that either... anyway.. go to google and search for mixers for linux and as far as mounting flopoy its just mount /dev/fd0 or mount /dev/floppy depending on how its defined in /etc/fstab - remember to unmount floppys before removing them as that is when it writes to it.

By saying disk drive your referring to the cdrom correct... It has to be unmounted before it can be opened.

Xnap is a multi protocol multi source p2p program - requires java. Do a search through the forums on xnap and java.

almost there
 

Okay, I almost have everything the way I want it. The onaly problemis, when x starts and I log in as my user name, I can't mount the cdrom drive, and even if I go to root within the shell, I still can't do it. The error message I get is wrong fs type, bad option, bad super block on dev/cdrom/ or too many mounted file systems. However, If when X starts I log in as root I can acess everything. What causes this. My fstab and mtab files seem to be the same whether or not I'm logged in under root. What gives?

Could you post your fstab file.

Re: almost there
 

try opening a terminal and typing:

ls -l /dev/cdrom

This will tell you what your permissions are. If they look like this:

r-xr--r--

then your root only has permission to work with the cdrom. If so, then type:

su -
<enter your root password>

chmod u+x /dev/cdrom

this will allow your user profiles to access as well. Also, what exactly are you typing to mount your cd-rom?

If it's a data cd, then you should be using:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom

If it's an audio cd, you can't mount it, but the permissions thing above would allow you to play them.

Hope this helps. :)