The possibility exists that someone else might have similar problems getting K3B and cdrecord to find a SATA cd/dvd/bluray drive, I traced cdrecord's problem to it's insistence that the media writer is /dev/sg*. Sew! at the bottom of /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules, I duplicated the last line [vim: G yy p] then changed the symlink to SYMLINK+="sg0" which created another alias to /dev/sr0. With /dev/sg0 pointing to /dev/sr0, cdrecord finds the drive. I can now write iso images using cdrecord in a terminal window. K3B, however, still barfs: "No optical drive found." One down; one to go. K3b is still useful for creating the iso image files.

--
Obquote: "We'll be back in about ten minutes with the correct time." -Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding.

On my own system I have added:

to /etc/rc.d/rc.local and this has solved the issue...

I reverted back to the sg0 alias pointing to sr0. With `modprobe sg` in /etc/rc.d/rc.local, sg[0,1,2] presented themselves, treating my system hard drives (SATA) as libsg devices. I don't know the side effects of having sda and sg0 pointing to two different devices created for the same hard drive, but the sg0 alias works. As for k3b, I was missing some kde packages. I'm running XFCE with only a couple of kde packages, and I didn't know what a critical minimum set would be. I lifted the following list of missing packages from a file in salix sources that listed prerequisites for k3b.

• udisks-1.0.4-x86_64-2 (I already had udisks2, but
• polkit-kde-agent-1-9d74ae3_20120104git-x86_64-1
• polkit-kde-kcmodules-1-001bdf7_20120111git-x86_64-1
• polkit-0.105-x86_64-4
• polkit-gnome-0.102-x86_64-1
• polkit-qt-1-0.103.0-x86_64-1
• amarok-2.8.0-x86_64-1
• analitza-4.10.5-x86_64-1
• perlkde-4.10.5-x86_64-1
• kdenetwork-4.10.5-x86_64-1
• kdewebdev-4.10.5-x86_64-1
• kwebkitpart-1.3.2-x86_64-1
• kross-interpreters-4.10.5-x86_64-1
• kde-base-artwork-4.10.5-x86_64-1
• kde-baseapps-4.10.5-x86_64-1
• kdeadmin-4.10.5-x86_64-1
• kdeartwork-4.10.5-x86_64-1

As the poet Browning might have pipped, "The hill-side’s dew-pearled; The lark’s on the wing; The snail’s on the thorn; God’s in His heaven— All’s right with the world!"