Okay, here's the problem. When I am Root, I can mount/unmount my cd-rw/dvd-rom combo drive (and play CD's, mp3's, etc.) When I am user, I cannot do any of the above. The error messages usually are along the lines of "there are insufficient permissions to perform the requested action (cannot mount /dev/cdrom)". I have tried everything I know to give user the same permissions for these actions as Root, with no success. Any suggestions? (I am having trouble posting my /etc/fstab in a way that is readable. Please forgive if this creates a problem)

Hi,
I changed the entry in my fstab to:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,users,ro 0 0

This allows any user on my system to mount and umount the cdrom.

-CD-

First add the user to the right group. This group can differ, and depends on whether you are using udev or static device nodes, and on the kind of CD-ROM drive (e.g. SCSI vs IDE). You can check it quickly by looking up what device /dev/cdrom links to. E.g.:

And check the ownership of that device:

In this case it is the "disk" group. If you use static device nodes, and prefer to add users to the "cdrom" group rather than the "disk" group, you can change the group for the device:

Now you have to add the user to the group that is used. You can do this with usermod. Be sure to name every secondary group the user belongs to. E.g.:

Now that the permissions are set correctly (log out to activate the new group settings), you can modify fstab. Add "user" to the mount options for the CD-ROM device, and you should be done.

dont try to mount "audio cds". try some data cd, edit fstab and the adding to cdrom group is also a nice option

hi welcome to lq and slack forum

Thanks, that worked great.

However, I am still not able to play DVD movies, either as root or user. I am using xine 0.99.4 and I get an error message saying, "There is no input plugin available to handle 'dvd:/'. Maybe MRL syntax is wrong or source doesn't exist". I am not sure if this is the right place to get help with a specific app, but if anyone has any ideas to help, I'd appreciate it. (And I do use a cd/dvd combo drive)

ls -l /dev/dvd
ls -l /dev/dvd0

If the above returns something like file not found then as root,

# ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd

If I linked /dev/hdc with /dev/dvd, how would that affect the cdrom function of my drive? In other words, should I change hdc to hdd (in the above line)?

If you only have one physical drive, then it's /dev/hdc, so you would use /dev/hdc. Making a symbolic link to /dev/dvd does not affect /dev/cdrom. Symbolic links do not know about other symbolic links to the same file. If you have seperate drives, then you'd want to change it to /dev/hdd (or whatever it may be).

Okay. /dev/dvd is already symlinked to /dev/hdc. And still no DVD playback. Actually, it plays the FBI warning message, then suddenly stops (no error msg given). In preferences->video, device used for DVD playback is set to /dev/dvd. Any ideas? (It plays mpeg and mp3 files just fine, just not DVD's.)

Do you have decss installed? It's needed to decrypt DVD content.

How do I find that out? I am using it as it was shipped with Slack 10.2 (I have not updated or modified it).

libdvdcss is not shipped with Slackware (it has questionable legal status in the USA due to the DMCA). You can grab Dropline's packages for libdvdcss, libdvdread and libdvdnav from this sourceforge page:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...ckage_id=71205

(you may have to expand the tree - they're in version 2.10.0), and install them using the installpkg command.

I'm using KDE. Does that make a difference?

No. Although Dropline is Gnome for Slackware, the libdvd* packages will work for any desktop environment.

Can you point me to install instructions?