Go ahead. I'll not argue for any distro
My understanding is that nothing has permissions to burn cdroms, but things borrow root's permissions in various ways. Befiore we run away, try

which k3b
ldd /path/to/k3b |grep found

You may be missing something

i just typed in what you put in that last thread and nothing happened

what was suppossed to happen plus what if i opened up a shell and execute k3b like this

will it grant root permissions when i do that

ps i found some dvdrws lying around i could use that as a test without having to dispose of any blank disks (its like i'm throwing my wallet away)

just ran it with sudo and it started the burn process without any lip (but maybe because it was a rw disk, i have had some experience with burners only writing to rws, also it is taking longer than it should, i can burn a 600MB disk in windows in under 5mins but what i am seeing right now looks like it will take 2 hours there is something wrong here, another theory i have is that it is trying to overwrite the dvdrw and so it is taking a long time and that it is a dvd movie image and it is 1.6GB

ps: the versions of pclinuxos i have aren't coming up on my system all i get is a shell after it tried to bootup
i tried
2009.1
2009.2
gnome 2009.1

i am going to list my system model and specs if that helps

Dell
Studio XPS 8100

is the onboard hardware on this system compatible with linux (its the latest computer from dell)

alright bad news i just tried to run a livecd of pclinuxos 2010 (thinking that it will work for sure) but it failed to bootupi just listed the system model on the post above maybe my stuff isn't compatible

just updated to lucid lynx and everything check out okay except that i have to turn the computer off a couple times to make ubuntu bootup i think its the new bootloader (it booted up no problem when i was using fedora but i don't like fedora because alot of the programs i used in ubuntu aren't easily installable and fedora doesn't have much variety in its repositories so i have to try to install everything from tarballs (source) and there isn't much detail in the readme docs telling you what you have to install first for the program to work

like for instance i had trouble installing aircrack-ng from source since its not in the repositories and you can't run a yum command to install it thanks for the help guys

what I think is you need to spend 15 dollars on a real nice cdrom dvd cleaner not some cheap 5 dollar one but the one with the nice fluffy brushes on it that comes with cleaning solution. Everything you describe is a poor reading of media.
Good luck

yeah, a nice cdrom dvd cleaner is necessary