>> Does 'eject' work from the command line at all on your system?
>
> Yes and no.
>
> The eject command works great to open and close the drive tray --- until I
> insert a disk. When I insert a disk and the drive tray closes, the eject
> command stops working. When I use the drive button to eject the disk, the
> eject command thereafter starts working again.
>
> Hence my previous comment that there might be some kind of soft lock
> occuring.

But TDE does not have any control over the operation of the
system-provided eject command, nor does it have the ability to lock access
to the CD drive.  Can you use the eject command with a CD in the drive
from within KDE4 or XFCE?

> I have a spare box with both a CD reader and a DVD burner that has both
> KDE3 and TDE installed. I'll burn two identical CDs and see what happens.
>
> I don't think breaking from the tradition or being different from the
> other desktops with this one feature will go over well with users. I hate
> WTF moments. :-)

Of course, and I do understand the rationale.  However, this corner case
is still a real possibility, and we don't want an even bigger WTF moment
if it is triggered for some reason.

A reasonable compromise might be to include the dev node name at the end
of the mount point in brackets, i.e. "/media/My CD Label (sr0)".  Once we
know how HAL handles this corner case via your test I can try to duplicate
its behaviour as much as possible.

Tim