[vox-tech] playing an audio CD

[Norm Matloff]

Being as busy as I am, unfortunately almost all of my work with
computers is "serious," e.g. no game playing. :-(

Now my 14-year-old daughter has suddenly decided she wants to become a
Linux user.  Yay!  But I can't seem to get either her Linux machine or
mine to play music from audio CDs, something of absolutely prime
importance to her. :-)  This is gonna be a dealbreaker for her, so we
risk losing a potential Linux enthusiast.  Thus any help you people can
give me would be much appreciated.

Both of our machines are i386 PCs, two or three years old.
My own machine is running Fedora Core 3, while hers is running 
Mandriva 2006 (i.e. Mandrake 10.2).

On my machine, the CD drive is (auto-)mounted at /media/cdrecorder.
(There is also a DVD player, at /media/cdrom.) I believe hers has the
same mount points, though I don't remember and don't have the machine in
front of me now.  Sound works fine on both machines, as verified by use
of other applications.  

On my machine, CD Player seems to be working, in that the slider bar
moves as time passes, but there is no sound.  (And movies play fine on
the DVD drive, using mplayer.) On my daughter's machine, the slider bar
doesn't even move, and an error message comes up.  On both machines, the
program provided to copy analog music to digital files on the hard drive
(don't remember the name now) does in fact work, as I verified.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how to fix this?

Do I need to create a /dev node?

And by the way, how do I use mplayer to play audio?  The documentation,
using the command-line format "mplayer cdda..." is unclear.

Norm