hey all,
i have yet another dumb question. i recently installed arson, a cd burning program, and when logged in my user account it doesnt recognize my burner, a sony crx75a, on /dev/scd0 when logged in as root, it recognizes and burns cds perfectly. i figured it wassomething to do with permissions, so as root i ran this command:
chmod 777 /dev/scd0

at this point i thought i was done, but when logged in as user again i still have the same problem. i can burn cds as root, so its really just an annoyance as i generally stay in user. thanks in advance! later!

Most cd burning programs in linux are front ends to cdrecord. Which distro are you running? A special group is usually setup for cdrecord called "cdwriter" and cdrecord is set with permissions "Set GID" and "Set UID" with the ordinary user being a member of the cdwriter group. If you set up another cdwriting program that came with your distro, it might set these permissions up for you. It's probably set up that way for security reasons. You could try running cdrecord Set UID by:

# chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrecord

and see if that works.

Note: cdrecord is owned by root and has to write to certain areas with root permission while burning a cd. Normally, a program will run with the permission set of the user that called the program. Set UID gets around this by allowing an ordinary user to call the program but lets it run with root permissions even though called by an ordinary user. Using Set UID can be a security concern for this reason-ordinary users can call programs that write with root permissions.