CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

alphaniner · 2011-11-09 19:58:55

tomegun wrote:

The point is that you should not need to be in any groups by default in order to use your computer, but udev, consolekit, policykit, udisks and upower should make things work for you.

The Beginner's guide still recommends adding the initial user to the following groups:

audio,lp,optical,storage,video,wheel,games,power,scanner

You said the storage group has been dropped, so I assume there's no point in joining that group. And most clearly depend on the config. of the machine. But do you recommend - at this point - that people don't join even video and power? Or is it more something that is being worked towards?

Thanks.

Last edited by alphaniner (2011-11-09 20:08:08)

tomegun · 2011-11-09 20:20:14

alphaniner wrote:

tomegun wrote:
The point is that you should not need to be in any groups by default in order to use your computer, but udev, consolekit, policykit, udisks and upower should make things work for you.
The Beginner's guide still recommends adding the initial user to the following groups:
audio,lp,optical,storage,video,wheel,games,power,scanner
You said the storage group has been dropped, so I assume there's no point in joining that group. But do you recommend - at this point - that people don't join the others? Or is it more something that is being worked towards?

I wouldn't go as far as recommending that people don't join (or to change the beginners guide). The simple reason being that I have not tried all the programs that might possibly be affected. However, to the best of my knowledge, in the vast majority of cases you don't need to be in any group (except for 'wheel'), and eventually you should not need to at all.

What I do is that I start out a fresh system without being in any groups and if I get permissions error I add myself to whatever group is needed (at the moment I'm only in the 'kvm' group).

alphaniner · 2011-11-09 20:33:59

Wow, thanks for the crazy fast response. I have a fresh system, and started as you suggested.

Though, I also declined to join wheel. I thought its only function was related to sudo, and I added a user-specific entry to sudoers instead. I guess I'll figure out whether or not this was a mistake. Anyway, thanks again.

tomegun · 2011-11-09 20:42:13

alphaniner wrote:

Wow, thanks for the crazy fast response. I have a fresh system, and started as you suggested.

No problem ;-)

alphaniner wrote:

Though, I also declined to join wheel. I thought its only function was related to sudo, and I added a user-specific entry to sudoers instead. I guess I'll figure out whether or not this was a mistake. Anyway, thanks again.

You are right about wheel. You don't need to be in it. The reason I mentioned it is that I think it might make sense for some to use it (I don't though), whereas the other groups there should really be no reason to be it at all (knock wood).

Gusar · 2011-11-09 20:47:57

The power group isn't used by anything, it's only user was HAL. You *do* need video for 3d acceleration. lp alone won't get you much, at least for a HP printer I need to be in sys as well (but maybe that's HP specific?). storage isn't used anymore. I have no idea about scanner, but default udev rules don't have anything about it. audio is still needed, except possibly if you're using pulseaudio. But for pure alsa, you need to be in audio.

So I'd say audio and video for sure, and then these if you need them - lp and sys for printing, optical for burning, wheel if you're using it with sudo.

tomegun · 2011-11-09 21:02:01

Gusar wrote:

The power group isn't used by anything, it's only user was HAL. You *do* need video for 3d acceleration. lp alone won't get you much, at least for a HP printer I need to be in sys as well (but maybe that's HP specific?). storage isn't used anymore. I have no idea about scanner, but default udev rules don't have anything about it. audio is still needed, except possibly if you're using pulseaudio. But for pure alsa, you need to be in audio.
So I'd say audio and video for sure, and then these if you need them - lp and sys for printing, optical for burning, wheel if you're using it with sudo.

consolkit will take care of many of these things for you. If it is set up correctly that is. I use 3d acceleration, ALSA audio (you'll need PA only for graceful handover when doing fast-user switching) and an HP printer, and as I said I'm not in video, audio, lp nor sys. Obviously your mileage might vary, but at least this should be possible, as it works for me ;-)

As to scanners, I'm honestly not sure about them, but the reference to the scanner group does exist in the rules shipped with the sane package (I never owned a scanner so don't know anything more than that).

Gusar · 2011-11-09 21:19:34

Consolekit takes care of even 3d acceleration? Interesting.

Well, I consider consolekit/polkit an opaque black box, and prefer not using them. Maybe that makes me an old fogey, but meh.

tomegun · 2011-11-09 21:35:52

Gusar wrote:

Consolekit takes care of even 3d acceleration? Interesting.

Yeah, consolkit gives the active logged on user sitting in front of the machine permissions to use the device nodes he/she needs. There are some exceptions (e.g. firewire audio devices), but for the most part it works perfectly. The big benefit of this is for security. Anyone else logged onto your machine, but who are not actually sitting in front of it using it actively, can not do evil stuff like record your microphone or scrape your screen contents.

Gusar wrote:

Well, I consider consolekit/polkit an opaque black box, and prefer not using them. Maybe that makes me an old fogey, but meh.

You are not alone. I blame terrible upstream documentation.

mango123 · 2011-12-10 21:18:53

Add in /etc/fstab

/dev/cdrom   /media/cdrom   auto   ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0
/dev/dvd     /media/dvd     auto   ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0

Next from root user:

# mkdir /media/{cdrom,dvd}
# usermod -a -G optical YOUR_USER_NAME

In /etc/udev/rules.d/99-cdrom.rules

# permissions for IDE CD devices
SUBSYSTEMS=="ide", KERNEL=="hd[a-z]", ATTR{removable}=="1", ATTRS{media}=="cdrom*", GROUP="optical"

# permissions for SCSI CD devices
SUBSYSTEMS=="scsi", KERNEL=="s[rg][0-9]*", ATTRS{type}=="5", GROUP="optical", SYMLINK+="cdrom dvd cdrw dvdrw"

Reboot.
It's all.

rps63ifid · 2012-01-06 22:58:05

I'm going to be the first to admit that most of what has been written here goes right over my head... but I a have new, fairly clean installation of Arch on an older desktop, running GNOME. I am gradually getting all of the various packages installed. Smooth sailing until earlier today when I bumped into something that (at least to me and my pea-brain) seems to be related to this thread: I can't seem to use any discs inserted into my DVD or CD drives on the system. I have udev and udisks installed. Running "sudo udevadm info -a -an /dev/sr0" shows information about my DVD drive as expected, as does /dev/sr1 for the CD drive.

My user account is a member of groups wheel, games, video, audio, optical, storage, scanner, power (as noted in the installation guide).

At least a couple posts above reference a section from the beginner's guide about creating symlinks for /dev/cdrom and /dev/dvd, but that section seems to no longer be present in the beginner's guide, as best I can tell.

Having read through the above posts, the problem I am having seems to be related to all of the above, but it's not clear to me what I should do to resolve this in the right way... or whether this is still a known problem that hasn't completely been addressed in the current version of the udev package.

Thanks for any help you might offer.

--
/ron

tomegun · 2012-01-06 23:08:20

rps63ifid wrote:

I'm going to be the first to admit that most of what has been written here goes right over my head... but I a have new, fairly clean installation of Arch on an older desktop, running GNOME. I am gradually getting all of the various packages installed. Smooth sailing until earlier today when I bumped into something that (at least to me and my pea-brain) seems to be related to this thread: I can't seem to use any discs inserted into my DVD or CD drives on the system. I have udev and udisks installed.

If you are trying to use your CD/DVD through nautilus or other gnome apps, this should "just work" without the need for any tweaking, symlinks or group membership. If it does not this is a bug in gnome (or possibly one of its dependencies: udisks, consolekit, udev or polkit).

If you are trying to access your drive on the commandline the same essentially applies, but here it depends a bit more on exactly what you are trying to do.

Could you describe what you are doing and what exact error messages you are seeing?

rps63ifid · 2012-01-07 17:56:11

@tomegun: Thanks for the response. As of this morning, I'm seeing slightly different behavior than yesterday afternoon immediately after installing vlc and gnome-mplayer when I was trying to use CDs and DVDs. It's possible the difference could be a result of rebooting the system after installing those packages when I shut down yesterday and restarted this morning, although that feels like a bit of a stretch to me. In addition, I updated this morning and the following packages were updated:

cryptsetup-1.4.1-1
glib-1.2.10-9
gmtk-1.0.5-1
gnome-mplayer-1.0.5-1
libpulse-1.1-2
pulseaudio-1.1-2

None of those feel relevant, but I suppose it's possible.

Data CDs seem to behave fairly normally this morning -- they definitely did not yesterday -- they show in a "mount" listing either /dev/sr0 or /dev/sr1 being mounted in /media/<disc label>, and GNOME asks whether I want to open them in "Files" or eject them. The disc label shows in Nautilus's "Devices" listing and I can browse the disc contents in Nautilus. That's progress and good news.

Movie DVDs behave a little differently than yesterday, but still do not work. They show in a "mount" listing as /dev/sr0 being mounted in /media/<disc label>, and GNOME asks whether I want to open them in Brasero or eject them (I might have expected vlc or gnome-mplayer to be offered as a more logical choice than Brasero in this context). The disc title shows in Nautilus's "Devices" listing and I can browse the disc contents in Nautilus. None of those was the case yesterday -- as best I could tell, they were being completely ignored yesterday. Attempting to open the DVD in either vlc or gnome-mplayer fails, though. By default both are looking for /dev/dvd (which does not exist), and generate the following errors:

gnome-mplayer: Couldn't open DVD device: /dev/dvd (No such file or directory)

vlc:
Playback failure:
DVDRead could not open the disc "/dev/dvd".
Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'dvd:///dev/dvd'. Check the log for details.

Attempting to open either /dev/sr0 or /media/<disc label> with vlc or gnome-mplayer is a disaster: the app locks up, and although I can log out, I can't shut down the system, and twice have had to resort to a hard reset with the power switch to get the system to shutdown so I can eject the disc from the drive.

Audio CDs in either drive are different from either of the above: GNOME gives me two choices "Open with Brasero Disc Burner" and "Eject"; they show in Nautilus's "Devices" list as "Audio Disc"; they are not listed at all in the "mount" listing and I really can't tell where the disc is mounted (it's definitely not under /media); I can't seem to get either vlc or gnome-mplayer to recognize the CD itself; I can right-click on an individual track in Nautilus and play the track individually in either vlc or gnome-mplayer.

Not sure if any of that will help troubleshoot...

--
/ron

rps63ifid · 2012-01-14 15:25:38

I'm still stuck with this problem... and would welcome any thoughts on the best approach to resolving it to get access to CDs and DVDs.

--
/ron

rps63ifid · 2012-01-27 22:15:10

Still stuck with this problem; I've been updating and periodically checking to see of something updates coming through udev, etc., would have any impact on this problem but no luck. In short, I am unable to do anything with audio CDs or DVDs.

I'd welcome any ideas as to how to address this.

--
/ron

tomegun · 2012-01-27 22:33:00

Hi Ron,

rps63ifid wrote:

Attempting to open either /dev/sr0 or /media/<disc label> with vlc or gnome-mplayer is a disaster: the app locks up, and although I can log out, I can't shut down the system, and twice have had to resort to a hard reset with the power switch to get the system to shutdown so I can eject the disc from the drive.

As far as I know (though I haven't tried for some time, I don't use optical media), DVD's/CD's should not be mounted before being opened by vlc/mplayer. You should just open the device node (/dev/sr?).

Regardless of that issue, what you are seeing are clearly bugs in vlc/mplayer (or possibly something deeper). No matter what, your system should never lock up. I'd open bug reports against one or two of those programs (try to describe your problem from scratch in the bug report in a concise way, it will speed things up ).

Audio CDs in either drive are different from either of the above: GNOME gives me two choices "Open with Brasero Disc Burner" and "Eject"; they show in Nautilus's "Devices" list as "Audio Disc"; they are not listed at all in the "mount" listing and I really can't tell where the disc is mounted (it's definitely not under /media); I can't seem to get either vlc or gnome-mplayer to recognize the CD itself; I can right-click on an individual track in Nautilus and play the track individually in either vlc or gnome-mplayer.

I would have thought you should be able to just open the device node (/dev/sr?), without it being mounted.

In order to get good debugging output I'd try running e.g. vlc from the terminal: 'vlc dvd:///dev/sr0'.

Arch Linux

#26 2011-11-09 19:58:55

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#27 2011-11-09 20:20:14

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#28 2011-11-09 20:33:59

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#29 2011-11-09 20:42:13

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#30 2011-11-09 20:47:57

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#31 2011-11-09 21:02:01

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#32 2011-11-09 21:19:34

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#33 2011-11-09 21:35:52

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#34 2011-12-10 21:18:53

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#35 2012-01-06 22:58:05

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#36 2012-01-06 23:08:20

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#37 2012-01-07 17:56:11

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#38 2012-01-14 15:25:38

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#39 2012-01-27 22:15:10

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

#40 2012-01-27 22:33:00

Re: CD/DVD problem after update on 24/oct

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