[Hampshire] CD burning verify

Hi folks, a novice question. Background- I have taken on board the
recommendations to use Ubuntu as a desktop system to wean myself off
windows. I have already had a few months experience of using Debian in gui
and command line mode. One of the annoyances of Windows is that it does a
lot of hidden things to try to take the burden off the user, but this is at
the expense of user control. I'm finding a similar issue in Ubuntu (maybe I
should look to use a distro that's a bit more basic?)

I have burned a CD iso image with Gnomebaker and wish to verify the burn. I
also looked at Brasero, but neither app did a verify after burn, which is an
option I always use in Nero (Windows). However Brasero does have a facility
to "Check Integrity" which presents a panel which says "use a md5 file to
check the disc" which expects you to select some file - I presume a file
which contains an md5 checksum, in what format I don't know. Brasero's help
is no help on this, also googling didn't find anything.

I then looked for other methods suggested, involving mounting the cd and
using md5sum to generate a checksum to verify against the .iso file
checksum. However Ubuntu doesn't allow me to "mount /media/cdrom1" saying
"mount: No media found", whether I put in a normal CD or an iso image CD (I
have to admit I don't know the ins and outs of CD formats).

I discover that when you insert a CD in, Ubuntu automatically reads it and
mounts it, creating a separate directory under /media but using some logic
to determine how to do this according to what it finds on the CD. It doesn't
seem to use /media/cdrom even though this is in fstab. So I can't find a way
to just do a md5 sum on this CD nor do I know how to generate an md5 file
that Brasero expects.

Russell