DVD player not visible after switching user or logging out.

Hi :)

That should really be 2 separate threads as the questions are different. It can be difficult to tell sometimes so don't worry.

1. For your wife's account. Please boot into your own account first and go to

System - Administration - User&Groups - Wife'sAccountName - AdvancedSettings - UserPrivileges

and check that your wife's account has a tick in the boxes that look relevant to allow her access to the cd/dvd-drive.

2. For multimedia playback including getting libdvdcss try working through this guide
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu
You don't really need to understand what it says but just avoid wiping out the non-free components. Where it gives a choice between i386, powerpc & 64bit or whatever choices it gives i found that putting the wrong lines in just meant the line didn't work so i tried the next line until one did work. And then i realised what the options meant ;)

After doing 2 i tend to install vlc & mplayer to get a few extra codecs but it sounds like you have already done that part. Oh, and of course you will probably need to install a flash-player.

Thanks and regards from
Tom :)

Hi Tom,

I have had a look in wifes user privileges and it had "Use CD-ROM Drives" ticked. Everything else bar accessing admin privileges, connecting to wireless, monitoring system logs, and sharing files over a local network is ticked. Don't know what else I can do. Like I said if we reboot into her account the DVD is visible.

I'll take a walk through the Medibuntu guide again and give it a go.

Cheers, and happy new year.

Jacques

Hi :)

The wife's problem is outside my area so don't worry that i couldn't help with that. Hopefully either someone else in here might be able to help but i would be tempted to re-post that issue as a separate question if you don't get an answer within the next 6 hours. Launchpad questions are only really good for the first 24hours-2days, after that they are difficult for answerers to find.

If you don't get an answer within that time i would copy the question to
http://www.linuxquestions.org
and
http://www.ubuntuforums.com
between the 3 of us we usually get good answers out there!

If you boot into her account and then switch to yours do you have troubles accessing the drive? It all seems quite weird to me, but then it is outside my area so i was just curious if there was a work-around. Also how many accounts are there in total? (Look in the /home folder)

cd /home
dir

Should give just a couple folders such as "lost&found" but will mostly only be registered users on your system.
Regards from
Tom :)

Hi again :)

Sorry i forgot to say that the beginning of the medibuntu guide should open the appropriate repositories that contain things such as libdvdcss and google-earth and stuff. But libdvdcss contains some proprietary stuff (ie, NOT all OpenSource) so you need to make sure that you don't re-restrict yourself to just OpenSource.

I think somewhere near the end of the medibuntu guide it gives you something to copy&paste (using the mouse's right-clicks) to install libdvdcss.

Going back to permissions. Can your wife's account run "sudo" commands using just her password? Can it install stuff? In a Windows system you need to restrict what users can do but then it never really sticks to the restrictions you give it. In linux systems it does stick to the permissions given but you don't need to be so restrictive.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo
http://librenix.com/?inode=21
In fact it is usually better to give them permission to install programs and stuff unless they only use the machine extremely rarely because then they can be more productive without hassling you so much.

In the Windows world that would be a nightmare but linux is constructed differently.

At college i used to be a "milkman". At one house, every morning i would fumble with the catch to open the gate, race down the path, dump the milk by the door, race back just in time for the gate to have shut again. Oiling the latch didn't make it less tricky. The gate was only just too high to jump and there was always some reason i couldn't quite get back to the gate before it shut. One morning i tried doing my round backwards and arrived at the gate in daylight. There was no fence either side of the gate! Windows 'security' often reminds me of that gate.

Regards from
Tom :)

Thanks Tom.
This problem was solved at last my giving my wife admin privileges and creating and entry in fstab for the DVD drive.
Cheers,
J

Hi :)

Brilliant, nicely done :)
Congrats and regards from
Tom :)