Debian Linux CD-ROM Tips & Tricks

Tips on working with CD-ROM, Floppy, CD-RW, Zip devices on Debian Linux:

Can't play the audio CD while logged into Gnome as user, since only root can mount the /dev/cdrom?

If you have 'linuxconf' installed, select the drive you want to access in the 'Access local drive' section. In the Options tab select the User Mountable option. Alternatively, give mount permissions to the user in /etc/fstab as - (add 'user' in the fourth column)

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 user,exec,dev,ro,noauto 0 0

Why don't I see long filenames of my Windows CD-ROM on Linux?

If you can see the long filenames of your cd-rom under Windows but not under Linux, it may be formatted using Microsoft's proprietary Joliet filesystem. It allows for long filenames encoded using the 16-bit UNICODE format. You just need to enable the flag for 'Microsoft Joliet file system extensions' in your kernel configuration. If you want to display filenames with native language characters from Joliet CD-ROMs correctly on the screen, you need to enable support in the kernel for the appropriate NLS ISO8859 character sets.

How do I read the volume label of my CD-ROM?

You may either use the utility called volname or run,

dd if=/dev/hdc bs=1 skip=32808 count=32 (use appropriate device name)

How can I tell the speed of my CD-ROM device?

This is only an approximate way of telling: This command measures how long is takes to read 3000K of data from CD:

time -p dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/null bs=1k count=3000
3000+0 records in
3000+0 records out
real 7.18
user 0.03
sys 5.07

The transfer rate of single speed drives is 150 kilobytes per second, which should take about 10 seconds. At double speed it would take five seconds, quad speed would take 2.5, etc. The "real" time above is probably the best number to look at -- in this case it indicates a double speed drive. For better results, increase the amount of data or run multiple iterarion for a better approximate value.

Want to duplicate a VCD from another VCD?

cdrdao read-cd --paranoia-mode 2 --read-raw --driver generic-mmc --device 0,0,0 data.toc

How do I get my CD-Recorder (CD-RW) get to work?

Scan for CD Recorders on your system with cdparanoia -Qsv once. This might give any information on the available CD recorders on the system. Also read the man pages of cdrecord, mkisofs, cdda2wav, cdparanoia.