newbie mount problems
 

hi,
I have recently installed mandriva 10.1 using kde.

i would like to have the icons for my dvd rom and dvd burner on the desktop and accesible to the few user acounts i have created.

in a user account i have been setting up the icon only shows when i check the box to display unmounted dvdrom, regardless of whether there is a disk in the drive, does this mean it is not mounted properly?

Also i can only access files on the drive if i switch to root. the owner and group of /mnt/cdrom are both set to root but i can't seem to change the group to one i made for periferal devices, which all of my users are a member of.

i have been using the command logged in as root

chown root:perifdevice cdrom/
(the smiley is actually ':' followed by 'p')

but this fails each time even though the group perifdevice shows up in the mandrake control center, in the users and groups section.

Any advice on getting user access will be gratefully recieved

I'm not sure about your icon issues, but the user:group issue is well understood:

Generally CDROMs and floppy disks are formatted for Windows, and use a FAT filesystem. This filesystem has no concept of a "user"; It is from a time period when DOS and Windows had no multiple user concept; The computer was a computer, and how could it ever have more than one user?

Your CDROM will likely have an entry in the /etc/fstab file. (I'm running Fedora, but I'm assuming that your distro has similar features and setup.) If the fstab entry for the CDROM contains the "user" option, then users will be able to mount / umount the filesystem. (It does have to be umounted by the user that mounted it, though.) The owner of everything in the mounted CD can be changed using the -o option on the mount, or by adding additional options in fstab. Specifically, add the option(s) uid=owner,gid=owngroup, where owner and owngroup are replaced with what you'd like to see. You can also add mode=value to set permissions on all the files in the filesystem. These options hold for vfat filesystems as well (like a floppy).

Hope this helps.

ok i've had a look in the /etc/fstab file
the lines in there relating to the cd drives are as follows

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 user, iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0022,user,iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0

so am i right to think as this includes user in the list anyone logged in should be able to mount the drives.
if i were to include the option(s) uid=owner,gid=owngroup does it matter where in the line i include these
also i know this may seem a stupid question, but how do you know if the cd drive is mounted. sorry i'm new to this

From a command line, just type mount to see all the mounted devices.

I'm assuming that you really don't have a space between user, and iocharset. You can add uid= and gid= anywhere in this comma delimited list. The user option should allow any user to do the mount. Specifically, they should be able to type "mount /mnt/cdrom" to mount the device. They shouldn't be trying to do the entire mount; they should only be allowed to access the definition in fstab.

This is true for floppys, but not CD's or DVDs - they use the iso9660 filesystem and optionally they may also use extensions to that like Joliet (for Windows) and Rockridge (for UNIX). Luckily modern Linux's seemlessly support both types of extensions.

You're absolutely right; My mistake. CD and DVD is always mounted as type iso9660. Don't know what I was thinking, other than that they're generally compatible with Windows, where a floppy with an EXT2 filesystem on it isn't. Mentally, I'd lumped them together, and shouldn't have.

ok, i've been experimenting with different settings but the problem turned out to be that i didn't have any user access permisions on the /mnt folder.
i am confused as i thought if you jumped straight to a file or folder it only mattered what the permision was on that file,
eg if i have no access to /mnt but i do in /mnt/cdrom then it would be ok to type
cd /mnt/cdrom but not if i change directory in two stages, eg 'cd /mnt' then 'cd cdrom'
is my understanding just wrong or is there somewhere to set this behaviour up?