SCSI CD-ROM drives
(From the CD-ROM HOWTO) Any SCSI CD-ROM drive with a block size of 512 or 2048 bytes should work under Linux; this includes the vast majority of CD-ROM drives on the market.
EIDE (ATAPI) CD-ROM drives (IDECD)
Almost all double, quad and six speed drives are supported, including
All CD-ROM drives should work similarly for reading data. There are
various compatibility problems with audio CD playing utilities.
(Especially with newer low-end NEC drives.) Some alpha drivers may not
have audio support yet.
Early (single speed) NEC CD-ROM drives may have trouble with currently
available SCSI controllers.
PhotoCD (XA) is supported. The hpcdtoppm program by Hadmut Danisch converts PhotoCD files to the portable pixmap format. The program can be obtained from
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/hpcdtoppm or as part of the PBM utilities.
Also, reading video CD is supported in kernel series 2.1.3x and later. A patch is available for kernel 2.0.30.