Setting DMA for DVD on startup? Script?
 

Very much a newbie, playing with my new Suse 9.1 install and loving it...

After much board hopping and FAQ reading, I finally got my DVD drive to play movies under Xine, with one catch...

Every time I log in as a user, I have to manually go into the console, log in as root, and do a "hdparm -d 1 /dev/dvd" for my dvd drive to set DMA to 1 to cure it of choppy playback.

Can I write a little script and drop it somewhere so it will automatically set the DMA when I log in as a user? I've googled for the answer but either get an unhelpfully vague "just drop it in your startup scripts" or get buried in information overload.

Thanks:study:

Yes you can and its easy. But its yet easier to open yast2 > system > runlevel editor, choose expert mode and set the dma script (read the description at right) to run at boot time, say in runlevel 3.

Thanks! Checking back in to say it worked!

Well, the real story is that it worked eventually. Like the newbie that I am, I accidentally was exploring yast and apparently blew away my symbolic links to my cd and dvd drives :cry: before finding the DMA setting. Of course, nothing worked when I tried to run xine, and I got many mysterious errors as my dvd failed to work in xine (could not find dev/dvd, driver errors, stuff like that).

I thought I'd killed my machine.

Well, many hours of googling and konsole experimenting later, I got my symbolic links established again (yikes, don't want to go thru that ever again)

Finally, I carefully paid attention while I was in Yast, set the DMA to on, and everything works perfectly now.

Sheesh. Takes me back to the days of config.sys and autoexec.bat tweaking. Linux is a lot like my fiance, wonderful and amazing, but just don't screw up or you'll have many late nights alone ;)