I'm using eroaster to burn CD's but have to log into root every time i want to use it. When I try to detect the cd in the preferances im given the error

Couldn't detect your reader / recorder !
Please make sure that you are root or that you're allowed to read /dev/sg* !

Ho w do I give myself permission to read /dev/sg*?

Tip of the day number 2 suggested that to allow a non root user to use eroaster to,

"set the suid bit to cdrecord and cdda2wav"

if that's a better solution then how would I do that?

Depends on which group owns the device(s), and what
permissions the group has.

if there was a group cdburning, with rwx permissions,
you could just make your normal user member of that
group.

chmod +s `which cdrecord`


That's a matter of taste. Personally I like the
group approach better...


Cheers,
Tink

I like making a group called "burning," then change ownership of the burner to group burning. Add the users you want to be able to burn to the group. should work fine.

(sorry Tinkster, you beat me to the draw...)

Thanks for you replies guys but when it comes to groups, users and permissions i have a huge hole in my learning. One I'm trying to fill!

Depends on which group owns the device(s)
how would I find this out?

change ownership of the burner
how would I do this?

I've logged into the MCC and gone to services>users clicked the Group tab double clicked the groups CDrom and CDwriter and checked my username in both groups. But I still cant use eroaster.

Please type slowly in big fonts.

Did you log out and back in before you tried using eroaster again? If not, you're still logged in as not part of these groups (which are probably the groups that Mandrake has set as being permitted to use these functions, as they are not "default" Linux groups).

So try that first, as it's likely that Mandrake has taken care of all the "ugly" stuff, like setting the uid bit on cdrdao and all that.

Alternatively, you could always just run eroaster as root while logged in as a user (if using KDE, then a shortcut to 'kdesu eroaster' would bring up a password prompt and then run eroaster, gksu or gnomesu are similar frontends for GNOME, or simply opening a terminal, using the su command to get a root terminal, and typing 'eroaster &' (without the quotes) would work as well).

You could also change burning programs-- KDE has a nice one available called K3b, which will offer to set up the permissions for you when you run it the first time as a user. I use GNOME, and don't even have KDE installed, but I've instaledl K3b separately from KDE and it works fine.

Or you could do it manually, if you really wanted to, but there are a lot of programs that would have to be changed (all of the ones for which eroaster is a front-end: cdrecord, cdrdao, cdda2wav, etc). What you would have to do is basically open a file manager as root (in a terminal, su to root and open your preferred file manager, or use the KDE shortcut to File Manager (Super User) if you use KDE), browse to the /usr/bin directory, and choose one of the programs (for this example, let's take cdrdao, as it's the first one I came up with). If you select it, right-click, and choose "Properties", then go to the "Permissions" tab in the resulting window, you will see the owner and the group owner. If this is root/root, you'd want to give "others" execute permission and also check the "set user ID" box to make this program executable with the owner's (root's) permissions by persons who are not root or members of the root group. You would have to do this for all the programs connected to eroaster (all the command line CD-burning utilities installed on the system, which I'm sure a Google search would provide a list of the possiblilities, while the Mandrake Control Center=>Software Management=>RPMDrake (remove software) would tell you which programs were actually installed).

If the properties indicate that the owner/group are root/cdwriter (which they probably are), then all you have to do is add yourself to the cdwriter group, then log out and log back in to make eroaster available to you as a user.

Hope this helps.