Hrm. Looks like there's another reason some *NIXes might not quite be ready for the desktop...

My goals were simple: to drop a disc into the laptop's CD tray, type a command, and walk away until the rip finished. It can't be that hard; people barely capable of booting their computers can do it. It certainly wouldn't be worth a column.

Thus began a week-long saga of trying to rip CDs on FreeBSD.