I apologize in advance if this is a really simple issue that indicates only my lack of expertise.

I just installed Fedora 3. The CD drive was detected as a burner and set up as "hdd" - it works fine. But the CD player is looking for a device named "cdrom." I can tell the player as root to use "hdd" and this works fine, but when logged in as a normal user, I cannot force the player to change its device configuration.

Surely there is a way to tell the system that the same device can be referred to as "cdrom" and "hdd." I just do not know what it is.

Thank you all.

Basically:

ln -s /dev/hdd /dev/cdrom
(As root, or course, and assuming that is the cdrom entry that needs to be created.)
This creates a link from /dev/cdrom to /dev/hdd. The /dev/cdrom file will be considered to be equivalent to the /dev/hdd file.
I think this will work.