Re: Can't play CD's on SuSE 9.0

From: Bill Chapman (insignus_at_hotpop.com)
Date: 06/25/04 

Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 07:00:09 GMT

Larry I Smith wrote:
> Bill Chapman wrote:
>
>> I am unable to figure out how to play cd's, that is,
>> how to play audio CD's using my SuSE 9.0 professional
>> with a KDE desktop.
>>
>> ----
>>
>> A lot of people have been complaining they can't play
>> CD's and their problem is they have the volume turned
>> down in KMix. That's not my problem. In KMix I have
>> the volume under the little picture of a CD up at the
>> max. (The red light under the scale is not on, whatever
>> that means). More importantly, in their cases I think
>> they are getting the KsCD GUI coming up visibly on
>> the screen, and I'm not even getting that.
>>
>> ----------------------
>> ----------------------
>> KsCD:
>> ----
>> ----
>>
>> In SuSE 8.0, I could play CD's with KsCD, selected
>> from Menu -> Multimedia -> (audio or something) -> KsCD.
>> I had to put them in the DVD tray rather than the CD-rom
>> tray for some reason, but it worked.
>>
>> Since then I upgraded to SuSE 9.0 personal, found out
>> there was no emacs in it, and upgraded that to SuSE 9.0
>> professional.
>>
>> A few days ago, when I selected
>> Menu -> Multimedia -> CD Player -> KsCD, it came up, but
>> it would not respond to any buttons I pushed. It didn't
>> matter whether I had the CD in the DVD or the cdrom tray.
>>
>> Then it quit working altogether. Now, when I select
>> Menu -> Multimedia -> CD Player -> KsCD, I get the little
>> flashing icon to the lower right of the cursor for about
>> 3 seconds, then it just goes away without the GUI of
>> KsCD coming up on the screen.
>> When I do a 'ps auxww | grep -i kscd' I see that there is
>> a kscd process there, asleep.
>>
>> I've googled around a bit and haven't found anybody else
>> with the same problem with KsCD.
>>
>> I looked on the SuSE linux support portal and they say
>>
>> > Find out the device file for your CD-ROM drive by entering the
>> following command on the command line:
>> >
>> > ls -l /dev/cdrom
>> >
>> > The output line/s will be similar to this:
>> >
>> > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Jun 6 12:25 /dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdb
>> >
>> > /dev/hdb is therefore the device file for the CD-ROM drive in this
>> example. Now we will modify the permissions for this file according to
>> our needs. Please proceed as follows:
>> >
>> > 1. Login as root in the command line by entering the command su
>> and then answering the password request.
>> > 2. Now enter chmod 640 /dev/hdb to assign access rights for your
>> CD-ROM drive to the group.
>> > 3. Then assign your CD-ROM drive to the group "disk" by executing
>> the command chgrp disk /dev/hdb.
>> > 4. Finally, make sure that you belong to the group "disk". Use
>> YaST or YaST2 user administration for this purpose.
>>
>> so I followed the instructions up through step 2. Step 3
>> was unnecessary since the file already belonged to the group
>> "disk".
>> I couldn't get Yast2 to put me into the group "disk", but
>> I figured I could put myself into the group "disk" by editing
>> /etc/group directly. I did this, and also found out that the
>> permissions of the device file were reset to protected every
>> time I reentered the desktop.
>>
>> So I rebooted, entered the desktop, did the su & chmod on the
>> cdrom device file, and entered Menu -> Multimedia ->
>> CD player -> KsCD. The GUI KsCD did not come up on the screen,
>> and like before, a kscd process came up sleeping. ps auxww
>> shows it as
>>
>> > USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
>> > panther 3095 0.0 4.6 30500 18080 ? S 21:13 0:00 kscd
>> -session 117f000002000108804874200000071460010_1088050107_318244
>>
>> OK, so I can't get KsCD working. Neither the SuSE user guide
>> nor the administrator guide are any help.
>>
>> ---------------------------
>> ---------------------------
>> WorkMan:
>> -------
>> -------
>>
>> The SuSE 9.0 personal manual says there is another audio CD
>> player, "WorkMan". But
>>
>> > find / -iname '*work*man*'
>>
>> did not find the player. Looking for it in the Yast2
>> software installer turns up nothing.
>>
>> ---------------------------
>> ---------------------------
>> xmcd:
>> ----
>> ----
>>
>> There is also Menu -> Multimedia -> CD player -> xmcd,
>> which when I run it, the user interface does come up on
>> the screen, but it says "no disc" whether I have a cd-rom
>> in the cdrom tray or the dvd tray.
>>
>> ---------------------------
>> ---------------------------
>> cd-console:
>> ----------
>> ----------
>>
>> I did a search on Yast2 for 'cd' and found cdcons, a
>> console oriented (ie non graphical) cd player. I did
>> a search for it with find / -iname '*cd*cons*'
>> and found it was really named cd-console, which neither
>> Yast2 nor the cdcons documentation told me.
>>
>> When I ran cd-console, it said no disk was present, whether
>> I had the disk in the cdrom tray or the dvd tray. Note this
>> is the same thing that xmcd is saying.
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Note that I get an error if I try to mount the cdrom.
>>
>
> Hmm, one thing I've noticed on my SuSE Pro v9.0 is that
> all the user id's are members of the groups 'audio' and
> 'video'.
>
> Try using YaST to add an existing user to the 'audio' and
> 'video' groups; maybe that's ('audio' at least) required
> to get CD access.
>
> Regards,
> Larry
>

Thanks, I had a look and it turns out I'm already a member of
both of those groups, so that's not the problem. 

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