Just one of those minor-annoyance-newbie-problems I guess. BTW, I'm using slackware 10 with kde 3.2

When I'm logged in as root, I can't eject my cdrw, it will mount and unmount just fine, but won't eject. The button on the drive won't work either. The dvdrom works just fine. I can do it in a konsole window, so I think it's a kde problem. If I'm logged in as a user, both drives work fine.

Also, when logged in as root, I get some error message (and a little "jingle") from kde when I mount either my cdrw or my dvdrom. It flashes by and disappears too fast for me to read it. Everything still seems to work fine. It does not appear when logged in as a user. Is there a way for me to make this error stay so I can see what it says?

Take a look at the logs in /var/log. From a term, run dmesg to see if anything shows up.
As for preserving that error message, give the mount command manually (not from kde menu) and add the tee command via pipe to an error file: something like

mount -t iso9660 /mnt/cdrw | tee errorfile.txt
(this assumes the cdrw has mount point /mnt/cdrw. substitute you actual mount point).

Tee command lets the command go through normally, and sends a copy to the file you specify (think of the letter T, with input going in one way, and out two ways).

The file errorfile.txt is empty, but in the term window when I mount the cdrw (as root) I get this:

mount: block device /dev/cdrw is write-protected, mounting read-only

Could that be the error message showing up in kde? Can I make it stop? When I try to mount the drive as a user from the command line I get

mount: only root can do that



Edit on the eject problem. When logged in as a user, eject will not work for either drive in kde or term window, but the button on both drives does work. When I try to eject in a term window, I get

eject: unable to open '/dev/hdc'

I tried dmesg at a command line and a whole bunch of stuff shows up but the only thing that looks like an error is this:

[fglrx:firegl_unlock] *ERROR* Process 2224 using kernel context 0

and I'm pretty sure that just has to do with the video driver.

I looked in /var/log, not sure what I should be looking for but in dmesg it is the same thing up to a point, the dmesg from the command line had about two pages of "extra stuff" not in /var/log/dmesg. Should that be?

Please excuse my newbie-ness, I hope this makes sense