Thanks for your three (very different) replies.
From Scott's comments I take it that the mount/unmount
of file systems is such a basic part of *nix that it might take some lateral thinking to circumvent it.
As for Sylvain's suggestion, I set up automounting this evening, but unfortunately this did not solve my problem: the same processes attached to /dev/cdrom were still open (5 belonging to wine and 1 to wineserver), and <eject> gave a "device busy" response.
Tony Lambregts:
What version of Wine are you useing. Disk changing should not be a problem under the latest releases of Wine.
I'm not exactly sure. As you guessed I'm using Transgamings current winex installation (subscription version).
WineX is a different flavor of Wine, So it may still have this problem. In other words if you have this problem when useing Wine then you should report it to http://bugs.winehw.org . Since you have this problem under WineX I guess you should be contacting Transgaming.
I guess, except that's where I first posted this message and got no satisfactory response. Perhaps I ought to approach them more directly as you suggest.
I regularly use Riven which is a five disk set. In order to play the game I have to change disks when I move from one island to the next. I do recall that about a year ago that there was a problem in that Wine would not close off files so that umount would not work.
There is one possible significant difference between installation of a program and changing disks in the course of a game as you describe: in the first case wine is running setup.exe which is on the CD, and hence wine has processes open which access the CD drive. In your case wine is running the game program which has been transferred to the hard disk. It is now Riven which accesses the CD drive and (conceivably) when the time comes to change the CD, it will first close down all processes which use the drive. Maybe.
Thanks for your comments. I would welcome further discussion if anybody cares to join in.
Roger Young r.young@irl.cri.nz