"Vincent Povirk" madewokherd+d41d@gmail.com writes:
So the HAL thing doesn't work for everyone, and this works for a lot of people. When you see /media/cdrom, you can be sure it's a cd-rom drive. So why not use it?
Because HAL is supposed to work (assuming you have the proper libraries), and if it doesn't work this should be investigated and fixed. And once it's fixed, the drives created manually are going to interfere with it.