I am trying to migrate to open source software but accomplishing such a simple thing as getting my dvd player to work seems to be a long tedious process.

Here's my /etc/fstab file that was created by suse, the only thing I changed was I made the /media/cdrecorder and /media/cdrom mount use the iso9660 instead of being auto and I added the /media/dvd mount.

/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb5 /backups ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdb1 /ftp ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda5 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder iso9660 ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom iso9660 ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/dvd auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0


When I cd to /media/* it doesn't show the cd in any of the sub directories with a cd or dvd in the drive.

When I manually add the dvd mount by doing
# mount -f auto /dev/scd0 /media/dvd

It allows me to browse the dvd's & cd's by entering the /media/dvd dir.

What is different in /etc/fstab than what I'm doing manually to mount it? Or how do I tell if this distro is loading the /etc/fstab file at startup?

All filesystems need to be mounted in order to read them. SuSE does not automatically mount removable filesystems such as CDroms, floppies. Therefore, to be able to read the files you have to manually mount the device. The easiest way to do this is to right-click on the desktop icon for the DVD drive, and choose Mount. Left clicking on the icon mounts the device and opens a filemanager in the root directory of the mounted disk.

I'm assuming you have a combo drive and have tested it under suse? There is no desktop icon for cdplayer, cd/rw or dvd. I am using a combo drive that combines cdrw/cdplayer/dvd player in one unit and I have no desktop icons to access any of the features.

As I said before, if I manually mount it with:
# mount -f auto /dev/scd0 /media/dvd

then I can access the files on the dvd but this is the only way I can get linux to access it. If I have to do this everytime I boot up my computer then that doesn't make it a simpler alternative than windows does it?

I thought /etc/fstab was for automounting file systems? You're saying in SuSE /etc/fstab doesn't automount removeable file systems but other distros do?

Yes, I have a Samsung Combo drive in SuSE.
No, SuSE doesn't automatically mount removable filesystems. Mandrake is the only distribution I know of that does.

If you have no desktop icon, make one. Right click on an empty area of the desktop and choose Create New CDROM/DVDROM Device. Then click on the Device tab, choose one of the fstab enties and click OK. Test the icon to see if it works. If not, choose a different entry in your fstab (you may have more than one relating to your dvd drive) until it does work.

Your other points.
Linux is not a simpler alternative to windows.
/etc/fstab is a file that makes mounting filesystems far simpler than doing it by hand all the time.

This is an old post but I thought I should followup to clarify what I've learned for any other new linux users who might come across this.

Being a windows user I didn't understand that each time you insert/remove a disk the removable media needs to be mounted but windows does this for us automatically.

My misunderstanding was that I thought it was actually mounting the hardware (dvd player), not the dvd media it contains.

Putting an entry in /etc/fstab automatically mounted the disk that was in the drive and I could access it no problem. When I tried to switch disks I had issues because it wasn't unmounting the existing dvd in the drive so I couldn't eject the mounted disk unless I used the umount command.

Thanks to the previous post I discovered you can and mount & unmount dvd's in suse 8.2 by Right click on an empty area of the desktop and choose Create New CDROM/DVDROM Device. Then when I'm done using the dvd I right click an empty area of the desktop and choose unmount CDROM/DVDROM device so I can put in another disk.

Yes this is very newbish but to someone who's used windows their whole life it's an important and frustrating concept to figure out for the first time so hopefully this thread helps out another newbie.

dopper - I wish other people who sorted out their problems would do exactly what you have done - a rounding-off post to explain how it all worked out.
I'm sure it really does help others who run into similar difficulties.
Thanks.