Maybe I have something setup wrong, or maybe Mandrake is screwed up, but I cannot get Linux to work with my cdrom at all! It does crazy stuff! Like just then I removed the CD that was in the drive and put in my OpenGL Game Programming cd so I could pull off some of the source and look at it. I opened the CD in nautilus, looked in it, found the source .zip i needed, and tried to open it. It said I couldn''t cause it was reading from a read only drive. Okay, fine. So I tried to copy the .zip to my hard drive. It never would. Nautilus was just not doing it. So I decided to do it the hard way and opened a console. When I tried to cp it, it said it couldn''t stat the file I was trying to copy. What? I shutdown nautilus and the cosole and reopened nautilus to see if something had gone wrong with it. I opened the cd-rom, but all the files were blank. They were there, but the file sizes and all wern''t showing up. I tried to copy the .zip I needed again, but it disapeared. Any time I did anythign with a file in nautilus it''d disapear, then reapear when I refreshed. What''s going on?!

Try checking your /etc/fstab file. Maybe you don''t have the correct mount permissions (a good way to check this is to try to do all that as root, and if it works, chances are permissions are the problem).

"OpenGL Game Programming" had two editions. The first one had .zip files with 0 bytes of data.
The second edition had actual content on the disc.
One thing you can do is verify that you have a disc with actual data on it in the first place.

If you pester the publisher enough, they will send you the 2nd edition disc and not just a 1st edition disc with the same problem. You really have to be specific, at least in my experience.

As far as Mandrake, my friend is really upset with the newest Mandrake, saying that they really borked up the goodness they had before.

Other than that, I don''t know what to tell you.

By default Mandrake uses some auto mounting supplement to the kernel (supermount?) to make CD-ROM drives pretend to be stateless (like what a Windows user would be used to), it doesn''t work correctly for everyone. It didn''t work for me when I was playing around with Mandrake 9.0, although Redhat 8.0''s auto mounter worked fine for me. I also noticed supermount seemed to work better with KDE''s desktop than Nautilus (probably not enough testing on Mandrake''s part, but I have really investigated this).

I doubt that that is what is causing your problem, but keep it in mind. If you turn it off, you can still mount CD-ROM''s (and floppies) with a right click to the Nautilus desktop.

I think I have a 1st edition (i only see 1 copyright date and nothing about a second edition) but the book came with two CDs. One is just a regular CD, and the second one says Replacement CD on it. The little pouch it came in was sealed with a sticker that says "Replacement CD. This CD contains the missing source code and DirectX SDK that were missing from the original CD."

Anyways, I found where I can download the source I needed, so I got around the problem, at least for now.