Hi. I'm used to sticking a cd or dvd in my drive and having it automatically mount, and having it automatically unmount and eject when I hit the eject button, but it doesn't seem to do that without a little tweaking I guess, in this distro, could somebody tell me how I'd make it do that?
It's mostly just a pain when I try to unmount the disks, as I get told that the device is busy, and it won't respond to anything.

Debian stable has a bit old versions of gnome and kde and these old versions may not support automounting "out of the box". Newer versions of gnome and kde (available in Debian unstable) should come with an in-built automounting capability. However, I don't use gnome or kde, so I don't know which version supports automounting or how you can set the (auto)mounting preferences in these DE's.

I use mount.app in WMaker and emelfm or mc as my file manager. I have also set the mount points in fstab and made symlinks to my home directory for easy access to these mount points. I don't need automounting because mount.app is easy to use and it mounts/unmounts all my removable media very reliably.

If your version of gnome or kde doesn't support automounting, then you too need to set the mount points in /etc/fstab and use either a file manager to mount/unmount your disks or install an additional app for that, like "xvmount".

Some file managers reserve the last visited directory, so you should probably change away from your cdrom/dvd directory (mount point) before exiting the file manager. Don't try to unmount/eject while some app is still accessing the mounted disks.

If disks refuse to unmount, you can open a terminal window and type "eject" and hit Enter. If that fails, "su" to root and try "eject" again. Doing "chmod 4755 /usr/bin/eject" (as root) might help if you continue having trouble unmounting/ejecting your disks.

Gnome 2.10 in Etch supports automounting.

cheers

Thanks guys. I'll try getting the newer desktop environment then. I've been having to do umount -l /dev/hdc ; eject cdrom, and opening up a terminal everytime I want to eject has been kind of a drag.
So if I wanted to just update all my stuff at the same time as kde to the unstable branch from sarge, could I just change everything in my sources.list to etch/unstable, and hit upgrade?

You can try install

# apt-get install eject

I believe this will solve your ejecting problem.

Etch is not Unstable. Sid = Unstable, Etch = Testing.
Etch currently has most gnome 2.10 packages and Sid does too. I would recommend upgrading just to etch initially and then upgrading to sid later if you wish.
So do this in a terminal
1. su
2. vi (gedit, nano, or <enter your favorite editor here>) /etc/apt/sources.list
3. Change all "stable" to "testing" even security because security fixes are now available for testing.
4. apt-get update
5. apt-get upgrade
6. apt-get dist-upgrade

Now you're ready to party because in gnome you push in your cd and it will magically open up a file manager!
There will still not be automounting in KDE though.