----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Curley" <charlescurley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Sat, Sep 16, 2006 at 10:30:28AM -0500, Scott Berry wrote:
I have a question concerning the fstab and mtab. How do I make
sure that the cdroms are read write both and is there a way to do
this in Gnome?
As root, use any text editor to make changes to /etc/fstab. Never edit
/etc/mtab; that is reserved for the mount system.
As for making CR-ROMs writable, don't bother. For the purposes of
mounting and /etc/fstab, they are read only. Mount will determine that
a CD is read only and mount it RO.
Software that writes to one writes to the raw device, bypassing the
whole file system entirely. At that point, the device had better not
be mounted.
<<jdow>> Charles, on the Amiga we had a way to appear to write to a
read-only style CDROM. It diverted the writes to a ram based or disk
based cache that was searched first before the CDROM was accessed for
read. Maybe this is the kind of tool the person is looking for.
On another hand there are some utilities that will mount a CDRW as
a read/slow-write filesystem on Windows machines. I've never tried
to use one. The concept seems silly to ME. This might be what he is
looking at.
On the gripping hand - maybe the concept of read-only physical
media has not penetrated somewhere it should.
One of the three hands may fit the situation here. Maybe if the
gentle-person explained what he intended a little better he might
get more astute answers.
{^_^}
