> Another question though: is it normal for an open("/dev/hdx") to fail if
> there is no cd in the drive? I'm not sure what the 2.0.x behavior is, but
> it's kind of annoying..
You have this with all removeable block devices: If there is no media you
can't open it. For CD-ROM drives it may be useful to open it even if there
is no media (for audio players or such), and you can do this by opening
the drive with the non-blocking flag set. See
Documentation/cdrom/cdrom-standard.tex for details. Same applies to SCSI
drives: both IDE and SCSI cdroms are handled by the generic cdrom
interface now.
Gerd