using my /dev items

[John Reinke <jmreinke@ukans.edu>]

I've been setting up my sound, and I still don't have everything up and
running yet. I've noticed that the sound effects for Enlightenment won't
start until esd (Enlightenment sound daemon) is running, and I can only
start that as root. Is this because /dev/audio (and therefore esd) is only
accessible by root?

I've had a suggestion to use groups to provide access to devices. Is this
the standard (and "safe") way to handle using sound for mutiple users while
using X? It doesn't seem that this is a common problem, so I feel I'm
missing something.

Also, I wanted to test listening to a CD, but somehow I can no longer
access CDs. The Debian install created /cdrom (I assume this is instead of
/mnt/cdrom) and there is no /dev/cdrom to mount in the first place. It says:

mount: special device /dev/cdrom does not exist

My CD worked perfectly in a previous installation. I now am using a
week-old net-install of potato.

Thanks,
John