Disk Utility sees CD. Rhythmbox doesn't
 

Ubuntu 10.10 on Toshiba Netbook. External CD Drive worked fine as boot drive when installing Ubuntu. Now I want to extract a music CD into Rythmbox, but "devices" never shows up in that ap. Nor is the drive visible in Places, though it is seen with Disk Utility. What am I missing here? Thanks in advance

As far as I recall, Rhythmbox doesn't rip CDs on its own. If you can do it through Rhythmbox, then it will be running another programme to do the ripping for it.

You can use sound-juicer - in Ubuntu it's named "Audio CD Extractor" in the menu, I believe :)

when you load the cd, does the system "see" it and ask how you want to open it?

Is the external CD set to mount automatically in "etc/fstab", or do you need to mount it manually? Perhaps your system is set up so that removable media is not auto-mounted, and possibly not even mountable by a normal user. You could try "sudo mount /dev/sr0" assuming your system sees the external disk as sr0.
Your laptop BIOS saw the drive as a boot device. That does not mean that Linux will automatically mount it. If it is not mounted, it won't be seen by most programs.

Just a stab in the dark - I recall there being a user group called cdrom or cd. Does your unix user belong to one of these groups?

To check what groups your user is associated with execute this in console:

$ groups <your username>

mounting CD problems
 

Thanks for the good suggestions. I think I am making progress. This is what I have done so far,

I tried "sudo mount /dev/sr0" with no success. I next tried:

sudo mkdir /media/CD
sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/CD
mount: block device /dev/sr0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

The drive still does not appear in Computer, but is seen by Disk Utility

Assuming this is progress, how do I find the "filesystem type" and what command do I use to enter that?

Thanks!

could you post/attach a screenshot of the cd/dvd drive portion of disk utility?

You might try
 

You might try
sudo mount -t iso9660 /dev/sr0 /media/CD

and make sure you "user" got reading rights in the area :-)

/media/CD
you might try to edit ore look on you´re
/etc/fstab if you're device is present there if it isn't then add it there and reboot....