[Techtalk] cdrw and dv drivers

[Wendy Galovich]

On Sat, 5 Jul 2003 14:07:15 -0400 (EDT)
Kathryn Hargreaves <kathryn at math.umb.edu> wrote:

> 
> 
> Where do I find drivers for Sony CDRW CRX 100E and NEC DV-5500A?
> I can't get the kernel to detect either of these.  I take it I need to
> recompile the kernel?

Hi Kathryn,

Some time ago I tried setting up a combination dvdrom/cdrw drive on a RH
8.0 system and surprised myself by stumbling on a solution. I see
several folks have already sent you answers about the cdrw, so I'll
focus on the dvd part of your question.

What I've seen on Red Hat is that the default install usually identifies
all cd and dvd drives as a cdrom; so you'll see /dev/cdrom with
/mnt/cdrom as its assigned mount in fstab, with the mount point set up
in your directory structure. If there is more than one "cdrom" drive,
the additional ones will show up as /dev/cdrom1 and /mnt/cdrom1,
/dev/cdrom2 and /mnt/cdrom2 and so forth.

However the default setup in most the dvd players I've seen assumes that
the dvd drive is at /dev/dvd or something similar. So you need to either
change the player default to point to /dev/cdrom (or /dev/cdrom1,
whichever one the system represents the dvd drive on your system), or
create a link in /dev to point /dev/dvd to /dev/cdrom. In my case, I
chose to create /dev/dvd as a symbolic link, by logging in as root and
entering the following on the command line:

ln -s /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd

Just a quick word about scsi emulation - for a dvd-only drive, it isn't
needed. So while you do need that argument in grub or lilo for the cdrw
drive, you don't need it for the dvd drive.

HTH,
Wendy