dvd writer not found

[Jerry Davis]

Yes, I bought a new laptop, and it is a good one too.
Not a bad price, and has everything working that needed to be working EXCEPT 
one that I would never have thought about: the DVD writer doesn't work.

Details:

installed ubuntu intrepid

intel wifi 5100 works flawlessly

nvidia (with proprietary driver, that I installed) works great.

have some troubles with kde4 konsole (looks like a lot of people are having 
problems with this), so I have regressed to gnome-terminal instead

got nfs working, and new version of gnuplot, and lyx installed, other minor 
programs installed to my needs. all works great.


then I was going to write some files to my CD-RW, and the device is not found.
it is installed as a scsi device, which might be the problem.
k3b says I can't use it to write, but read is ok (not sure about that part 
yet).

here are details as I know them:

1. dmesg | grep DVD

[    4.750131] ata2.00: ATAPI: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T50L, SR04, max UDMA/133, 
ATAPI AN
[    5.115430] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T50L  SR04 
PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

2. lshw

           *-cdrom
                description: DVD-RAM writer
                physical id: 1
                bus info: scsi at 1:0.0.0
                logical name: /dev/cdrom
                logical name: /dev/cdrw
                logical name: /dev/dvd
                logical name: /dev/dvdrw
                logical name: /dev/scd0
                logical name: /dev/sr0
                capabilities: audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram
                configuration: status=open


I have searched for GSA-T50L and {linux | ubuntu }, and not found anything 
useful.

any ideas?

jerry