Thanks for the words of encouragement, Jim.
The main reason I switched to to Fedora was because I was already
doing the bulk of my work with open source software. Firefox,
Thunderbird, and OpenOffice are what I use 90% of the time on my
computer. So even though I knew Fedora was not as "plug and play" as
Windows, I thought it would be workable since these programs were native
to Linux.
I expected it not to find things like my Canon scanner and my
Kenwood USB audio connection, as those are a bit obscure as hardware
goes. But, happily, Fedora detected them and they work fine.
Having a major deficiency like not being able to read data DVDs was
unexpected. Especially as Fedora installed just fine from one of the DVD
drives that it now won't reliably read.
If I can get past this one obstacle, I would love to continue using
Fedora. There's a lot I like about it. And I'm willing to learn
UNIX/Linux commands to settle into the environment. But I don't think
I'm being unreasonable in thinking that Fedora should at least read from
DVD/CD-ROM drives, that I'm not being a particularly whiny user in
wondering why there are difficulties with this basic hardware.
Dave