7.5.5.1. Mounting a CD

This is basically done in the same way as installing packages manually, except that you have to append the file system of the CD to your machine's file system to make it accessible. On most systems, this will be done automatically upon insertion of a CD in the drive because the automount daemon is started up at boot time. If your CD is not made available automatically, issue the mount command in a terminal window. Depending on your actual system configuration, a line similar to this one will usually do the trick:

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

On some systems, only root can mount removable media; this depends on the configuration.

For automation purposes, the CD drive usually has an entry in /etc/fstab, which lists the file systems and their mount points, that make up your file system tree. This is such a line:

[david@jupiter ~] grep cdrom /etc/fstab
/dev/cdrom      /mnt/cdrom      iso9660         noauto,owner,ro 0 0

This indicates that the system will understand the command mount /mnt/cdrom. The noauto option means that on this system, CDs are not mounted at boot time.

You may even try to right click on the CD icon on your desktop to mount the CD if your file manager doesn't do it for you. You can check whether it worked issuing the mount command with no arguments:

[david@jupiter ~] mount | grep cdrom
/dev/cdrom on /mnt/cdrom type iso9660 (ro,nosuid,nodev)