Question from a FreeBSD / KDE n00b: how to browse external devices

Factual Questions
1

I have a virtual machine (have had it for a couple years, actually) onto which I installed FreeBSD 7.1. It’s just a toy, really, and I futz with it occasionally.

My ability to do so would be enhanced greatly if I knew how to read the contents of an inserted CD. The virtual machine does apparently recognize that I have a CDROM drive (I can theoretically use the genuine hardware CDROM/DVDROM drive or stick a disk image such as .iso or .cue/.bin or other formats into a virtual drive). But I don’t know how to get to the disk contents! I have built FreeBSD with a KDE environment.

I’m familiar with the MacOS X Unix mount points schema (anything other than the root drive is mounted at /Volumes/VolumeName/ and of course the conventional GUI schemas (MacOS Finder, open folder to “Computer”, all volumes appear within; Windows “My Computer” or “Computer”, open, all volumes appear within). Neither seems to apply here in FreeBSD / KDE. Do I perhaps need to issue a command line instruction to MOUNT the CD at /something/that/I/specify ? The supplied GUI for browsing the disk structure appears to be a web browser, Konqueror, which doesn’t seem to have an entry for “here’s your CD and its contents”.

2

OK, there is an entry in Konqueror for the CD, see screen shot:

http://home.earthlink.net/~ah3files/Stuff/System.Media%20window.jpg

But clicking on it yields the error message “Feature only available with HAL”

::insert obligatory 2001: A Space Odyssey joke::

It does not appear to be mounted. Right-clicking and selecting “Mount” yields the error message “Feature only available with HAL”.

HAL, I assume, is “hardware abstraction layer”. But I have no idea how to invoke it or why it isn’t inherently invoked (?)

3

Never mind, I figured it out!

mount /cdrom from the Konsole

4

Then “umount /cdrom” when you’re done, and you can even run “eject” if you want or push the button on the drive instead. Note that umount doesn’t contain an “n.” I spent at least an hour puzzling over why “unmount” didn’t work when I was new to Linux.

It doesn’t matter what the mount point is, as long as it exists and is in /etc/fstab/. So if you wanted to mount it at /mnt/CDRom, you’d just make that directory and change /cdrom to that in /etc/fstab.

HAL is used to mount things automatically. I don’t know how your version works, but mine will pop up a little notification on bottom right of the screen and it gives you the option to mount it when clicked. I prefer to mount manually though because the sound of the cd drive spinning up annoys me when I’m not using it.

ETA: fstab controls where where things will be mounted, so that’s the first place to look if you plug something in and can’t figure out where to mount it. For example, mine has:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

as well as other info that you probably don’t need to worry about at the moment. If I put in a floppy and wanted to mount it, I’d look there then run “mount /dev/fd0” or “mount /dev/floppy”