K3b thinks there is a blank CD disc in the drive when there is not. At first, I thought it was the drive, and I went and bought a new one. I still have the same problem - except now I can actually write to the disk sometimes. Both CD and DVD projects are being written. However, on the CD audio project, it said the medium was too small for the project after selecting one 4:48 minute song. It actually burned the Slackware-current iso which seems to be fine. I got Brasero from sbo to burn the CD audio project.

I still think my old ASUS writer was bad for DVD burning since it went through the motions but only the title was burned to the disk, no data. Brasero works fine, but I wish I knew what happened to K3b.

Slackware leaves the permissions on the underlying programs standard.

This can cause problems with K3b. There is dialog within K3b which you can use to change the permissions on those programs to be fully compatible with K3b:

Settings -> Programs -> Permissions

You'll need to know the root password. After changing those, you might get better results. You should also ensure that your user is in the "cdrom" group.

Thanks for the reply. At least it is not in the zero replies email now.

I've been running Slackware64-current since its inception. I have a clean install of Slackware64-current on a separate partition. I have burned hundreds, if not thousands of cds and dvds. If I don't understand permissions by now, I never will. The behavior is the same on both installs, which tells me that it is more than likely a software problem.

I'll keep looking. Will probably try another distro with KDE and see what happens.

I just booted to my clean install of current. I issued slackpkg update, then slackpkg install-new, slackware clean-system, slackpkg upgrade-all. I then opened k3b just for the fun of it, and k3b says there is an empty cd-r in the bay. when I click on it, the specs for the disk are all zero.

I then inserted a dvd+r in the drive, opened k3b and it displays correctly. It also reads the correct specs for the empty disc. After removal, it still says there is an empty dvd+r disc, but the specs for the disc are gone.

I closed k3b, then reopened, and the empty cd-r is back. k3b is borked somewhere.

Have you previously done the following, as root, and included the user in the cdrom group?

Yes. Maybe the question should be simpler.
Why has something that has always worked, stop working as of about a week or so ago? I thought it was the writer, so I bought a new one. Same result.

Maybe k3b needs a rebuild.....

Have you put the suid bit on /usr/bin/cdrecord and /usr/bin/cdrdao as suggested?

These are required. They're off by default on a fresh installation.

You might also want to change permissions/ownership on some other optical disc (OD, CD, DVD, BD) programs as instructed by an earlier Slackware (13.n, 14.n?) README.TXT. K3B has been really buggy lately... not just on Slackware but KDE Neon GNU/Linux itself, earlier this or last year, K3B wouldn't detect any drives (others reported this also)... it was an actual critical bug in K3B itself... this may have been fixed, but for a while I just had to use cdrtools & growisofs on command-line instead...

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Does anyone have a theory as to why k3b says there is an empty cd-r, with all specs of the non-existent media at zero when the tray is closed and empty? I can insert an empty dvd in the tray and it specs it out perfectly. I burned the current Slackware iso with no problem.

I can't write an audio cd because it says the media is too small. Zero would absolutely be too small. Of course, the blank cd-r problem is the original complaint in the original post.

I am currently searching for the permission(s) to insert blank cd-r media into the tray.

Brasero is what I used for the audio project.