More on the embarrassing admission

Well, I chased the problem with not being able to dup disks from the
dvd drive in my iBook to the FireWire LaCie burner to a bug in the YDL
3.0.1 installer. It seems that there is nothing like /dev/dvd or
/dev/cdrom after doing a clean install with the 3.0.1 installer.
Unfortunately, the way I discovered this was by re-installing Linux on
my desktop because I wanted to change the partitioning scheme.

I understand that the lack of entries in the /dev directories may or
may not indicate a lack of drivers in the kernel. Beyond that my
knowledge of the relationship between the stuff in /dev and actual
drivers is pretty sketchy. With this level of knowledge is it
reasonable that I should try to fix this myself or should I just wait
for Terra Soft?