I've lost my access to the removable drives

[minthaka]

Why, I've lost the unmounting ability for the /dev/sr1 and /dev/sr0 devices. I can only unmount them as root. I can respect the sectarian weirdness of each desktop environment, but it's too much for Xfce. I cannot eject the DVD tray with a button, for "this is not the proper way of unmounting", and now I cannot change the mounting access. Any ideas?

[D-cat]

This is a new thing? This is usually indicative of a permissions fault.

Post the contents of /etc/fstab . We'll see if something's amiss.

[minthaka]

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=e55d91be-8a90-44c4-ac49-7781870c5150 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /Data was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=a756685a-1135-11de-a155-c1d59fc7187f /Data ext3 relatime 0 2
# /Music was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=6b942894-f269-4c5c-8d0e-eef07210bbc5 /Music ext3 relatime 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=003cad08-7cf2-42cf-9561-325385fc242a none swap sw 0 0
/dev/sr1 /media/dvd udf,iso9660 user,auto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/sr0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,auto,exec,utf8 0 0

I've been messing up with some folders' permissions, and suddenly it stopped letting me eject the tray. The command chown minthaka /dev/sr1 doesn't help.

[D-cat]

chown wouldn't work, the device needs to remain in control of hal and your automount daemon. The options look like the correct defaults for an Ubuntu system. My SuSE install has no entries in fstab for the optical drive; it just lets pmount set the mount point and permissions. You can try it and see if it helps (just comment out the last two lines with a "#" so you can easily undo the change if it doesn't work). Remember to use sudo (or gksu) to edit or you will not be able to save.

[minthaka]

No, your ideas don't work for me. I've even tried to eject the dvd from terminal, but it wouldn't let me do that as a regular user. Like the permission of ejecting wouldn't belong to me anymore. F*** Linux!

[elija]

Classic!

I broke it!

I've been messing up with some folders' permissions, and suddenly it stopped letting me eject the tray.

therefore

Like the permission of ejecting wouldn't belong to me anymore. F*** Linux!

The operating system is rubbish

Can you per-chance undo those changes?

[reed9]

I'm a little surprised that Ubuntu doesn't comment out the cdrom entries in fstab. My understanding is that if you're using hal, you don't want those entries in there and hal takes care of it. (And for the user to control the drives, you must be a member of the optical group. Not sure if Ubuntu has an equivalent group.)

[minthaka]

Well, I figured out the trouble. I used to watch .avi movies from DVDs with smplayer, and somehow the mplayer didn't want to release the device after the movie was over, the session manager have remembered that state, so each time I've boot up my system, I had to eject it as root (still don't understand why, and if I'm angry with Linux, that's because such kind of situations). I've removed completely and then reinstalled smplayer, so it seems now the trouble is solved.

[minthaka]

I'm a little surprised that Ubuntu doesn't comment out the cdrom entries in fstab. My understanding is that if you're using hal, you don't want those entries in there and hal takes care of it. (And for the user to control the drives, you must be a member of the optical group. Not sure if Ubuntu has an equivalent group.)

No those entries have been added by me, since I'm using my own media cataloging program, GamCat KDE-Apps.org, which actually reads the the removable devices from the fstab.
I don't know whether there are better options, but I found such a mess with mounting points in different kinds of distros, that it's really an art to code a good program, which would cover all of them. For example, the default entries for removable drives, written by the installer weren't the same I found later issuing the command 'mount'.
Maybe I'm wrong, but for now I haven't found better way to find a stable information about the removable devices present on the system.
Linux is not easy to use, nor to write programs for it, and the main obstacle is the difficulty of finding an unified way of working with devices. Each distro has its own flavor, but that isn't as good, not at all.