CDs in Linux are not as easy as in Windows. But in the latest versions it is getting better.

I don't know your distro, so I would say this. You need to know what your cdrom is called. Is it /dev/hdc, is it /dev/cdrom, or is it something else? If you wait a few minutes will your distro automatically detect the CD and mount it for you? Newer Red Hat, SuSE, many others do that. Have you ever been able to read a CD before? I remember on Red Hat 7.2 you had to edit modules.conf to add the line:

alias block-major-22 cdrom

before it would work right.

But you are probably going to have to at least mount the CD with a command line as root something like (this is simplified, you might have to put in the filesystem type):

mount /dev/hdc /mnt/hdc

and you have to make sure that the directory on which to mount it exists too. If it doesn't, use mkdir to create it.

Then, maybe the CD doesn't even really work, a connection isn't good. Who knows. But probably it won't work to just cd to / and then cd to cdrom. Only if it automatically mounted to the directory you created at /cdrom. Usually it is at /mnt/cdrom or /media/cdrom, or whatever the distro's convention is.

So here is one of the big differences between Linux/Unix and Windows, ease of use of floppies, CDs, DVDs, and other removable media. Unix was made for multiple users, and for a mainframe situation you can't allow just anyone to add or remove storage media, because you might crash another user or the whole system. Windows was for just one computer, so who cares if it crashes. Perhaps some of the problems lately are due to Linux trying to make it easier to remove removable media. After all, it does really irritate me when I put in a CD and mount it and use it, and then I can't get it to unmount and I just about have to relogin to get it to release it on some distros. For some people that is enough to make them not use Linux. So it is a problem.