Re: [Sheflug] mount & boot & cd sound

["Alex Hudson" <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

> On Sat, Jul 08, 2000 at 01:04:14AM +0100, Pete Smith wrote:
> > When trying Jose's mount/dev/hdb -tvfat/hdb/cdrom
>
> With linux, you have to be carefult with your "spelling". A
> capital is different to a normal letter, and spaces might count. The
> above is mis-spelled. You should have
> mount /dev/hdb -tiso9660 /mnt/cdrom

Just a little more on mounting....

Instead of having to type out the whole mount command, you can put an entry
in /etc/fstab. I suspect you already have an entry; and that the mount point
or something else is set to a silly value. If you have a look in that file,
you may be able to spot an obvious error: ignore the numbers and things,
just make sure that the device name is right, and that the mount point is a
directory that exists (It may be that logging in, and doing a 'mkdir /suse'
solves all your problems). Then you can just 'mount /mnt/cdrom', or
whatever. I personally set mine to 'mount /mnt/1cdrom' - I have a number of
devices I mount / dismount regularly; numbers first makes tab-complete
fantastic.

Also, when specifying the -t <fstype> arguments to mount, you can do '-t
auto' and make linux do a little work for you - it should automagically
detect the filing system type; leaves you with less to remember.

As for YaST, it doesn't use the fstab system : it mounts the CD-Rom all by
itself somewhere in /var/admin/mount or something equally hidden. If you
load up YaST, and it finds the CDROM, you can actually see where it has
mounted it - it's on the display, or in the 'change media source' menu, I
can't remember which. You'll find with YaST running you'll be able to access
the CD-ROM from it's own mount point.

Finally, CD-ROM sound. Most old CD-ROMs do analogue audio only - it's
directly injected into the sound card. Even with new ones, which support
digital sound, still use the analogue method because it uses no bus
bandwidth. What this means is; the only control your computer has over
playing CDs is in two places: 1) the cdrom , 2) the soundcard. There is no
intervening software, and it's not something that you can break by messing
with configuration (unless either your soundcard or CDROM is *completely*
inaccessible). To get sound to play, the computer needs to do two things.
Firstly, tell the CDROM to play the CD. Yours is doing this already; you can
hear the CD spinning. Unless it's a duff CD (possible, but unlikely) or a
duff CDROM (you'd know about it by now if it was, though), it's playing. The
second thing is to tell the sound card you want to listen to the CD. On
every sound card is a mixer: most cards have three or four audio sources
(digital audio, analogue CDROM, analogue mic, digital synth), but they're
not all piped through all the time, you need to tell the sound card to fade
in each source. I suspect this is the problem: the CDROM is playing, but the
mixer volume on the CDROM source is set to '0', i.e. no sound. With whatever
mixer software you use, try turning the volume up on the CDROM source. If
other sounds are working, the master volume control is set fine, so you just
need to check out the CDROM source: either the volume will be set on zero,
or there'll be a 'mute' setting.

Hope this helps,

Alex.


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