17/01/2009

Insufficient CD/DVD drive permissions on openSuSE 11.1

One of those "I should have known..." posts. I just could not get my flu-addled brain to google the problem and, I am ashamed to confess, watched DVDs on Vista instead.
  • Audio CDs and video DVDs were displayed in Konqueror, but not played (and yes, I had all the codecs).
  • K3b warned me about not having a burner.
  • wodim --devices found nothing.
This has made the most-annoying-bug list on opensuse.org, and the developers keep bickering in the bugzilla comments. The most popular workaround seems to be to add your user to the disk group, which works, but poses an ugly security risk: disk members have raw access to all hard drives.
Pawel Stolowski on the bugzilla thread suggests changing the group ownership to cdrom for all optical drives in the udev rules:
  • add your user to the cdrom group in YaST->Users and Groups.
  • create (sudo) a file 99-my.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ containing this line:
    KERNEL=="sr*[0-9]", GROUP="cdrom", MODE="0660"
  • reboot
Worked for me. There seems to be an upcoming hal etc. patch by Danny Kukawa, which ought to sort out the problem. Oh, and other cynical bastards like me out there might derive some guilty amusement from the troll wars in the bug thread.

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