Hi, Gentoo. I've now managed to play CDs in Gnome, primarily by adding myself to the cdrom group. I do wish all these restrictions, enforced by group membership, could be switched off.
Having played a CD, I discover there's no way to eject it; the physical button on the drive is inactive until I exit from Gnome, which is clearly suboptimal. However, if I start Gnome as root, I can eject a CD trouble freely. But running as root is also suboptimal. So, I thought, maybe this "feature" is another pesky group restriction. So I tried adding myself to group "disk", then to group "cdrw", all to no avail. I still couldn't eject the disk. Help, please! -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).