Edit /etc/fstab. Slackware did a pretty good job of setting things up for me. It missed my cd-rw, but as you can see in my /etc/fstab, it's really easy to add it in.
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hda1 /fat-c vfat auto,rw,umask=000 1 0
/dev/cd-rw /mnt/cd-rw iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/dvd-rom /mnt/dvd-rom iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,user 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
You'll notice that for my Windows partition, I've added umask=000. This makes it so that my regular users can use the partition. Also notice that my cd-rw is read only. You don't mount it to burn Cd's, so you don't need write permission in order to use it. I also added the sysfs entry. Something you have to do if you're going to be using the 2.6.xx kernel. I like the 2.6.xx kernel because I no longer need to enable SCSI emulation in order to use my cd-rw. I believe that's all the modifications I had to make to the /etc/fstab file. I also had to create /mnt/cd-rw, /mnt/dvd-rom, /dev/cd-rw, and /dev/dvd-rom. The devices I created are links to /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd . To give you an example of how I did this, you can use a command like:
ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/cd-rw
While we are working on the optical drives, now's a good time to make sure that /dev/dvd and /dev/cdrom point where you want them to. Also, check to see that users have permission to use all of those devices. Will save you a lot of headaches when you are trying to figure out why you can't listen to CD's and DVD's.