>> I have been beating myself up hard today troubleshooting
>> some of the TDEHW quirks I have been reporting.
>>
>> I believe we have two separate problems.
>>
>> One is the "eject -T dvd" command stops working as soon as a
>> disk is inserted. From what I gather online, this is a known
>> bug and there is a patch. I haven't looked for the patch or
>> tested.
>>
>> I verified the "eject -T" problem exists in Xfce 4.10 and
>> KDE 4.8.5 too. Thus, "eject -T" is broken one way or
>> another.
>>
>> The second problem is permissions. As root I tested Safely
>> Remove with USB flash drives and Eject with an optical disk.
>> The icons disappear for both, and the optical disk
>> physically ejects. Although after the disk ejects the "eject
>> -T dvd" command stops working until after I use the drive
>> eject button. Then the "eject -T" command works.
>>
>> I can't figure out what the permissions problem might be. I
>> don't see any special suid permissions on any of the TDE bin
>> files or the eject command. Could the TDEHW code cause this
>> behavior?
>>
>> Could pmount be causing this behavior? I never have used
>> pmount before so I am a complete noob.
>
> I found a patch that resolves the "eject -T" problem:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eject/+bug/91873
>
> The patch works.
>
> There remains a permissions problem. As normal user, from the command
> line, kdeeject fails but sudo kdeeject succeeds. With the former the icons
> won't disappear and with the latter they do.
>
> Darrell

This should be a system configuration problem.  From this thread:
http://ubuntu.5.n6.nabble.com/eject-not-working-unless-I-m-root-td4550555.html

"Your user should be in the group "cdrom" in order to eject stuff."

I suspect that your user also needs to be in a group for removable media
to be able to eject USB drives.

Tim