I needed to write an iso image to a DVD-R. I run brasero and
it claims there is no drive on the system. I run k3b in the
same login session, and it works fine. Does brasero only work if
I'm running a full gnome session with the 10,487 gnome daemons
in the background? (I'm running a custom fvwm session, not gnome).
Brasero is not well maintained but it's still strange it didn't see your drive at all. In either case, I moved on to xfburn for general use and use the command line (xorriso) for dual layer DB burning.