I am well aware that this list is free and voluntary and that no one is under any obligation to solve my problems so please don't think that I am unhappy with the people in this list. As I have said in other posts, I would really like to be able to leave the Gates world but so far this has not been possible. Still I am running into a lot of little problems that keep me going to Windows to get certain tasks done because I still can't solve these problems with SuSE. I think a lot of my problems are permission related but I can't solve them without a little help. With a little detective work I was able to find from fstab and Konqueror file manager all the relationships between CD drives and names. From Konqueror I find that /cdrom is a link to /media/cdrom. fstab shows me that /media/cdrom is a mount point for /dev/cdrom and Konqueror shows me that /dev/cdrom is a link to /dev/sr0. Great, now I have the chain but what do I do with this in order to get grip to work for a normal (not root) user? What permissions must be set? Why does the IDE DVD drive work with no adjustments while the SCSI CD-RW not work for a normal user but does work for root. Is it possibly the SCSI controller that needs permission adjustment? If so, how do I find what is the /dev and what permission must be set? [rant on] The really frustrating thing is that though I believe some of these problems to be simple ones, I get zero response. Also I find that these issues are VERY common but information scarce or incomplete. I feel that the Linux community is too secretive at times. Why do I see very long threads about disk polishing or YaST 1 vs YaST 2 but zero answers to what I believe are simple questions about devices? Why is it so often I see in FAQs or posts that critical details are omitted? Sometimes I have seen over time that there are many posts on a subject that could be answered if a FAQ contained sufficient information for the reader to be able to solve his problems. A good example is CD ripping. There is a FAQ at http://dinamizm.ath.cx/articles/cdrip.html that covers the subject but has several errors and is also lacking information that could help the reader to deal with exceptions. According to the SuSE 8.0 manual and posts in this list, typing audiocd:/ in Konqueror will let me rip CDs but neither the SuSE book or the posts have bothered to mention prerequisites that would allow this to work. Another great example is something really simple: symbolic links. I could find information in "Running Linux" (O'Reilly?) on creating a symbolic link but the writer didn't bother to mention how to get rid of a link. This is really stupid. How can a beginner be expected to guess that rm is the way to get rid of a link? [rant off] Damon Register